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

The options for building your own mini-computer abound. FAKE ROOT There are a myriad of tutorials on coding that even the most skilled student can benefit from. What is a student who is ambitious do? What is the best place for a teacher to begin? How do an edtech Entrepreneur determine which tools are the most effective?


Venture capitalists are betting that the horse that will win the race is Minecraft, because of Piper, a kit that helps students build their own computer, start playing Minecraft and, while doing so, learn to code. Piper, the company behind it, has raised $2.1 million in seed funding 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 based in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. It plans to make use of the funding for PiperEDU which is a version of Piper that is designed for schools with K-12 classes. Every Piper kit comes with an Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer and an LCD display. A powerbank is also included. The wooden case that serves as the computer’s chassis is also included. Piper Block, the education-friendly version, comes with additional parts to ensure that there are no mishaps in the classroom. Piper has hired curriculum designers to create professional development activities that align with Next Generation Science Standards. These will be included in the new product.


PiperEDU is also available at discounted prices. A normal Piper kit is $300; PiperEDU is $250 when a school purchases four units. If the price is too high, teachers have the option to rent Piper kits on a monthly schedule-two for $100 per month. They can then use the money they pay in rental costs to an eventual purchase.


In the past 18 months, the business has seen rapid growth. Piper graduated from the co.lab education accelerator at the last quarter of 2014. Piper launched a successful Kickstarter which raised $280,000 by the end of April. All the while he was working on the first version. The kit sold 1300 units during Kickstarter and 1700 more during the rest of 2015. Piper co-founder Mark Pavlyukovskyy believes Piper will deliver between 10,000 and 15,000 kits in 2016, especially with Christmas having boosted sales last year


Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's mishaps and educational ventures. In the course of creating a gamified health program in Ghana in 2012, he became sick with what doctors believed was cerebral malaria. He was then moved to England. He was having a dream when he realized he could be more effective as a programmer, rather than an advocate for health in the public eye. He was recovered and learned programming by himself.


The next obvious step, to Pavlyukovskyy, was to give this opportunity to children because, he 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 high for developing communities. He said, "Besides, I was just shipping components."


He focused his attention on the US and ran into another hurdle: children were keen to play Minecraft more than they wanted to assemble computers or learn how to code. The creators of Raspberry Pi were already ahead of him. They had already released Minecraft Pi an original Minecraft server that runs on the Raspberry Pi, in the end of 2012.