There are many options for building your personal minicomputer. There are a myriad of tutorials in coding that even the most experienced student can use. What can an ambitious student do? Where does a teacher even start? How does an edtech business owner be aware of which tools are the most efficient?
Venture capitalists are betting the winning horse in the race includes Minecraft, because of Piper Kit, a computer that teaches students how to build their own computers, begin playing Minecraft and, in doing it, learn how to code. 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 located in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. https://icdama.com/ It plans to make use of the funds to fund PiperEDU, a variant of Piper designed for K-12 classrooms. Every Piper kit comes with a Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer and an LCD display. A powerbank is also part of the. 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 also been hiring curriculum developers to develop professional development and activities that align with the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. These will also be included with the new product.
PiperEDU also comes at a discount. A typical Piper kit is $300; PiperEDU is $250 when a school purchases four units. If that price is too steep, teachers have the option to lease Piper kits on a monthly schedule-two for $100 per month. Then, they can apply the money paid in rental fees towards the purchase.
The company has seen rapid growth in the past 18 months. Piper graduated from the co.lab education accelerator in the last quarter of 2014. He launched a successful Kickstarter, raising $280,000 by April 2015. While he was raising funds, he was developing the first version. It sold 1300 units during the Kickstarter and 1700 units during the remaining months of 2015. Mark Pavlyukovskyy, co-founder of Piper is predicting that Piper will ship between 10,000 to 15,000 kits in 2016, specifically due to Christmas being the biggest driver of last year's sales.
Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's educational endeavors and misadventures. While developing a gamified health curriculum in Ghana in 2012, he was diagnosed with what doctors believed was cerebral malaria. He was transferred to England. In a dream, he evaluated his life and concluded that he could have a bigger impact as a programmer rather than as an advocate for public health. He was capable of recovering and learned programming by himself.
The next step, to Pavlyukovskyy, was to give the opportunity to children as, he thought, "If I can teach myself, so can others!" He tested the idea in India, Ghana and Kenya using the newly in vogue Raspberry Pi microcontroller, but the price point was too high for developing communities. He explained, "Besides, I was simply shipping components."
He turned his attention to the US but he ran into another obstacle: kids were keen to play Minecraft more than they wanted to construct a computer or learn to code. The developers of Raspberry Pi were already ahead of him: They had launched Minecraft Pi, a unique Minecraft server that works with the Raspberry Pi, in the tail end of 2012.