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 more coding tutorials than even the most dedicated student could ever do with. What's an ambitious student to do? Where does a teacher even begin? What can an edtech businessperson determine the tools that will work?



Venture capitalists are betting that the winner of the race includes Minecraft, because of Piper Kit, a device that teaches students how to build their own computer, begin playing Minecraft and, doing so, 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, located in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. It plans to use the funding for PiperEDU, a variant of Piper designed for K-12 classrooms. Every Piper kit includes an Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer and an LCD display. A powerbank is also part of the. The wooden case that acts as the computer’s chassis is also included. Piper Block, the education-friendly version, includes additional parts to prevent any accidents in the classroom. Piper has hired curriculum designers to create professional development and activities that align with Next Generation Science Standards. These will also be included with the new product.



PiperEDU is also available at discounted prices. Pnp89's blog While a typical Piper kit costs $300, PiperEDU will cost $250 when a school purchases four units. If that cost is too high, teachers have the option to lease Piper kits on a monthly basis, two for $100 per month. They can then apply the money paid in rental costs to an eventual purchase.



In the past 18 months, the company has seen rapid growth. After having completed the co.lab edugaming accelerator at the end of 2014, Piper launched a successful Kickstarter and received $280,000 by April of 2015, while working on the first version of the kit. It sold 1300 units on Kickstarter and 1700 more during the rest of 2015. Mark Pavlyukovskyy is the co-founder of Piper, predicts that Piper will ship anywhere from 10,000 and 15,000 kits in 2016, particularly with Christmas having boosted the sales last year.



Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's mishaps and educational ventures. When he was implementing a gamified health curricula in Ghana in 2012, he became sick with what doctors guessed was cerebral malaria and evacuated to England. He was having a dream when he realized he could be more effective as a programmer rather than a public advocate for health. He was capable of recovering and learned programming by himself.



Pavlyukovskyy decided that the next step was to offer the opportunity to children. He thought, "If i can teach myself, then why not others!" He tried the idea in India and Ghana using the latest Raspberry Pi microcontroller but it was too expensive for the developing communities. He explained, "Besides, I was just shipping components."



He focused his attention on the US and ran into a second obstacle: children were keen to play Minecraft more than they wanted to assemble a computer or learn to code. The makers of Raspberry Pi were ahead of him: They had already released Minecraft Pi an original Minecraft server that works with the Raspberry Pi, at the tail end of 2012.


Homepage: https://pnp89.com/