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

There are many options for building your personal minicomputer. There are more tutorials on coding than the most committed student would know what to do with. What is an ambitious student to do? TAZINAT.COM Where can a teacher start? How does an edtech business owner know which tools are most effective?



Venture capitalists are betting the winning horse in the race includes Minecraft thanks to Piper Kit, a computer that teaches students to assemble their own computers, begin playing Minecraft and, while doing it, learn how to code. Piper is a company that has raised $2.1 million in seed money from Princeton University, Reach Capital 500 Startups, FoundersXFund, Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype) and Jay Silver (the founder of Makey Makey).



The company, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. It is planning to use the money to develop PiperEDU which is a version of Piper specifically designed for classrooms with a K-12 age. Every regular Piper kit includes the Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer, an LCD display, a powerbank, a speaker, and an oak case that is the computer's chassis. Piper Block, the education-friendly version, includes additional components to avoid any accidents in the classroom. Piper has also hired curriculum developers to develop professional development activities that meet the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. These will also be included with the new product.



PiperEDU is also available at a discounted price. While a typical Piper kit costs $300, PiperEDU will cost $250 when a school purchases four units. If the price is too steep, teachers have the option to lease Piper kits on a monthly schedule-two for $100 per month-and apply the money paid in rental fees towards an eventual purchase.



The company has seen rapid growth in the past 18 months. After having completed the co.lab edugaming accelerator at the end of 2014, Piper launched a successful Kickstarter and raised $280,000 by the end of April 2015, all while developing the first version of the kit. It sold 1300 units during the Kickstarter and 1700 units during the remaining months of 2015. Piper co-founder Mark Pavlyukovskyy predicts Piper will deliver between 10,000 and 15,000 total kits in 2016, especially due to the Christmas season, which has helped boost sales last year.



Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's mishaps and educational ventures. In the course of implementing a gamified health curricula in Ghana in 2012, he was diagnosed with what was believed to be cerebral malaria and evacuated to England. He was in a frenzied state when he realized he could make a greater impact as a programmer than an advocate for health in the public eye. So when he was lucky enough to recover, he started teaching himself to program.



Pavlyukovskyy decided that the next step was to give this opportunity to children. He thought, "If i can teach myself, then so can others!" He tried the idea in India and Ghana using the brand new Raspberry Pi microcontroller but it was too expensive for the developing communities. He added, "Besides, I was just shipping components."



He focused his attention on the US and ran into another hurdle: children wanted to play Minecraft more than they wanted to assemble computers or learn how to code. The developers of Raspberry Pi were already ahead of him. They had launched Minecraft Pi, a unique Minecraft server that runs on the Raspberry Pi, in the end of 2012.


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