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Piper Raised $2.1 million to Teach Kids to Code Through Minecraft

The options for building your own mini-computer are endless. There are numerous tutorials in coding that even the most experienced student can benefit from. What's an ambitious student to do? Where should a teacher start? How can an edtech businessperson know what tools are most effective?



Venture capitalists are betting the winner of the race will include Minecraft because of Piper, a kit that teaches students to assemble their own computer, start playing Minecraft and, doing this, learn to code. The company has received seed money of $2.1 million from Princeton University, Reach Capital and 500 Startups, FoundersXFund as well as Jay Silver (the founder at Makey Makey), Jay Silver (the co-founder of Skype) and 500 Startups.



The San Francisco-based company founded in 2014, plans to make use of the funds to launch PiperEDU, a variant of Piper specifically designed for classrooms with a K-12 age. Each Piper kit includes the Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer and an LCD display. A powerbank is also provided. The wooden case that serves as the computer's chassis is included. The education-friendly version, named Piper Block, also comes with additional parts to ensure that classroom mishaps do not cause a complete shutdown of the kit. Piper has also been hiring curriculum developers to develop professional development activities that align with the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. These will be included in the new product.



PiperEDU is also available at a discounted price. Whereas a normal Piper kit costs $300, PiperEDU will cost $250 when a school purchases four units. Teachers can rent Piper kits on an ongoing basis for $100 per month, or use the rental fees to finance a purchase.



In the last 18 months, the business has seen rapid growth. Piper graduated from the co.lab education accelerator at the last quarter of 2014. He launched a successful Kickstarter, raising $280,000 by the end of April. While he was raising funds he was working on the first version. It sold 1300 units during Kickstarter and 1700 more in the rest of 2015. Piper co-founder Mark Pavlyukovskyy believes Piper will deliver between 10,000 and 15,000 kits in 2016, especially after Christmas, which helped boost sales last year.



Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's mishaps and educational pursuits. While implementing a gamified health curricula in Ghana in 2012, he fell ill with what doctors believed was cerebral malaria and evacuated to England. He was in a frenzied state when he realized that he could have a greater impact as a programmer, rather than an advocate for health in the public eye. So when he was lucky enough to recover, he started teaching himself to program.



The next step, according to Pavlyukovskyy was to offer children the chance to learn because he believed, "If I can teach myself, then I can teach other people!" He tested the idea in India, Ghana and Kenya using the recently popular Raspberry Pi microcontroller, but the price point was too high for emerging communities. He explained, "Besides, I was just shipping components."



He turned his attention to the US and ran into a second obstacle: children wanted to play Minecraft more than they wanted to assemble computers or learn to code. The makers of Raspberry Pi were already ahead of him. Ealatorre They had already released Minecraft Pi, a unique Minecraft server that runs on the Raspberry Pi, in the end of 2012.


My Website: https://www.ealatorre.com/