The options for building your own mini-computer are endless. There are more tutorials on coding than the most committed student could ever do with. What is a student who is ambitious do? What is the best place for a teacher to begin? How do an edtech entrepreneur know which tools are most effective?
Venture capitalists are betting the winner of the race will include Minecraft, because of Piper Kit, a computer that helps students build their own computer, start playing Minecraft and, doing so, learn to code. Piper 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 make use of the funding for PiperEDU, a variant of Piper specifically designed for classrooms with a K-12 age. Every Piper kit comes with the Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer and an LCD display. A powerbank is also included. The wooden case that forms the computer’s chassis is also included. Piper Block, the education-friendly version, comes with extra parts to ensure that there are no incidents in the classroom. Piper has also hired curriculum designers to develop professional development activities that support the objectives of the Next Generation Science Standards. These will be included in the new product.
PiperEDU is also available at a reduced price. While a standard Piper kit costs $300, PiperEDU will cost $250 when a school purchases four units. Teachers can rent Piper kits on a regular basis for $100 per month or make use of the rental fees to finance the purchase.
In the last 18 months, the company has seen rapid growth. After graduating from the co.lab edugaming accelerator towards the 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 the Kickstarter and 1700 more during the remaining months of 2015. Piper co-founder Mark Pavlyukovskyy anticipates Piper will deliver between 10,000 and 15,000 kits in 2016, particularly with Christmas having helped boost sales last year.
Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's personal educational adventures and mishaps. In the course of implementing a gamified health curricula in Ghana in 2012, he became sick with what was believed to be cerebral malaria and evacuated to England. He was in a fever dream when he realized he could make a greater impact as a programmer than as an advocate for health in the public eye. When he was fortunate enough to recover, he began teaching himself programming.
Pavlyukovskyy thought that the next step was to give the opportunity to children. He thought, "If i can teach myself, why not others!" MINECRAFT He tried the idea in India and Ghana using the new Raspberry Pi microcontroller but it was too expensive for emerging communities. "Besides it was just shipping parts," he said.
He focused his attention on the US and ran into another obstacle: kids wanted 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 released Minecraft Pi an original Minecraft server that runs on the Raspberry Pi, at the tail end of 2012.
No comments yet