Piper Raises 21 million to Teach Kids to Code Through Minecraft
There are a myriad of possibilities to build your own minicomputer. There are many tutorials in coding that even the most experienced student can take advantage of. What is a student who is ambitious do? Where does a teacher even start? EXTREME CRAFT What can an edtech businessperson know the tools that will work?
Venture capitalists are betting that the winning horse in the race will include Minecraft thanks to Piper Kit, a computer that teaches students to assemble their own computer, start playing Minecraft and, in doing so, learn to code. Piper is a company that has raised $2.1 million in seed capital from Princeton University, Reach Capital, 500 Startups, FoundersXFund, Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype) and Jay Silver (the founder of Makey Makey).
The company, which is located in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. It plans to make use of the money to develop PiperEDU, a version Piper designed for K-12 classrooms. Every regular Piper kit includes the Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer, an LCD display and powerbank, as well as a speaker, and an oak case that is the computer's chassis. The education-friendly version, named Piper Block, also comes with additional components to ensure that any mishaps in the classroom do not cause a complete shutdown of the kit. Piper has hired curriculum designers to create professional development and activities that align with Next Generation Science Standards. These will be included in the new product.
PiperEDU also comes with discounted prices. While a standard Piper kit costs $300, PiperEDU will cost $250 when a school buys four units. Teachers can lease Piper kits on an ongoing basis for $100 per month, or make use of the rental fees to finance a purchase.
In the last 18 months, the company has seen rapid growth. After graduating from the co.lab edugaming accelerator at end of 2014, Piper launched a successful Kickstarter and raised $280,000 by April of 2015, while working on the first version of the kit. It sold 1300 units during Kickstarter and 1700 more in the remainder of 2015. EXTREME CRAFT Piper co-founder Mark Pavlyukovskyy anticipates Piper will deliver between 10,000 and 15,000 total kits in 2016, especially with Christmas having helped boost sales last year.
Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's mishaps and educational endeavors. When he was developing a gamified health curriculum in Ghana in 2012, he became sick with what doctors guessed was cerebral malaria and moved to England. In a dream, he assessed his life and realized that there was a greater chance of impact as a programmer than as a public health advocate. extreme minecraft server crafting going on here When he was fortunate enough to recover, he taught himself programming.
Pavlyukovskyy thought that the next step was to offer 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. "Besides it was just shipping parts," he said.
He turned his attention to the US, but crashed into a second obstacle: children were keen to play Minecraft more than they wanted to build computers or learn how to code. The makers of Raspberry Pi were ahead of him. They had already released Minecraft Pi an original Minecraft server that runs on the Raspberry Pi, in the end of 2012.
