Notes

Piper Raises $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 skilled student can take advantage of. What is an ambitious student to do? Where should a teacher begin? How does an edtech entrepreneur determine which tools are the most efficient?



Venture capitalists are betting the horse that will win the race is Minecraft, because of Piper Kit, a computer that helps students build their own computer, start playing Minecraft and, doing this, learn to code. It has received seed funding 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 company, which is located in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. It is planning to use the money to develop PiperEDU which is a version of Piper designed for K-12 classrooms. Each regular Piper kit includes the Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer, an LCD display as well as a powerbank, speaker, and the wooden case that acts as the computer's chassis. Piper Block, the education-friendly version, comes with extra parts to ensure that there are no mishaps in the classroom. Piper has also been hiring curriculum developers to create professional development and activities that align with the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. These, too, will be part of the new product.



PiperEDU is also available at the price of. Whereas a normal Piper kit costs $300, PiperEDU will cost $250 when a school purchases four units. If that cost is too high teachers can choose to lease Piper kits on a monthly basis-two for $100 per month-and use the money they pay in rental fees to the eventual purchase.



The company has experienced rapid growth in the past 18 months. Piper graduated from the co.lab education accelerator at the last quarter of 2014. He launched a highly successful Kickstarter that raised $280,000 by the end of April. All the while he was working on the first version. It sold 1300 units during the Kickstarter and 1700 more during the rest of 2015. Mark Pavlyukovskyy is the co-founder of Piper believes that Piper will ship anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 kits in 2016, specifically due to Christmas being the biggest driver of the sales last year.



Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's own educational adventures and mishaps. 360 degrees all the way around When he was implementing a gamified health curricula in Ghana in 2012, he became sick with what doctors believed was cerebral malaria and moved to England. While in a frenzied dream, he reassessed his life and realized that he could have a bigger impact as a computer programmer than as a public health advocate. So when he was lucky enough to recover, he began teaching himself to program.



The next step, to Pavlyukovskyy, was to give the opportunity to children as Pavlyukovskyy thought, "If I can teach myself, so can others!" He tested the idea in India, Ghana and Kenya using the newest Raspberry Pi microcontroller, but the price was too expensive for the developing communities. "Besides it was just shipping parts," he said.



He focused his attention on the US and ran into another obstacle: kids were keen to play Minecraft more than they wanted to assemble a computer or learn to code. The creators of Raspberry Pi were ahead of him: They had launched Minecraft Pi which is a unique Minecraft server for the Raspberry Pi, at the tail end of 2012.


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