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

The possibilities for creating your own mini-computer are endless. There are many tutorials in coding that even the most skilled student can take advantage of. What can an ambitious student do? Where should a teacher start? What can an edtech businessperson decide the tools that will work?



Venture capitalists are betting the winner of the race will include Minecraft because of Piper Kit, a computer that teaches students to assemble their own computers, begin playing Minecraft and, doing it, learn how 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 company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. It plans to make use of the funding for PiperEDU which is a version of Piper specifically designed for classrooms with a K-12 age. Each Piper kit includes a Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer and an LCD display. A powerbank is also provided. The wooden case that acts as the computer's chassis is included. Piper Block, the education-friendly version, comes with extra parts to ensure that there are no incidents in the classroom. Piper has hired curriculum designers to create professional development activities that support Next Generation Science Standards. These will also be included with the new product.



PiperEDU also comes at the price of. While a standard 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 they can 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 end of 2014. He launched a highly successful Kickstarter that raised $280,000 by April 2015. All the while developing the first version. It sold 1300 units during Kickstarter and 1700 more in the remainder of 2015. Mark Pavlyukovskyy is the co-founder of Piper believes that Piper will ship between 10,000 and 15,000 kits in 2016, especially due to Christmas being the biggest driver of last year's sales.



Piper started with Pavlyukovskyy’s misadventures and educational ventures. He was working on a gamified healthcare program in Ghana in 2012 when he was struck with what doctors believed was cerebral malaria. He was evacuated to England. While in a frenzied dream, he assessed his life and realized that there was a greater chance of impact as a programmer than as an advocate for public health. He was recovered and learned programming by himself.



Pavlyukovskyy decided that the next step was to provide 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 developing communities. Minecraft He added, "Besides, I was just shipping components."



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


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