The options for building your own mini-computer abound. Cranial cavity There are numerous tutorials in coding that even the most skilled student can take advantage of. What can a student with ambition do? Where should teachers begin? What can an edtech businessperson know what tools are most effective?
Venture capitalists are betting the winner of the race will include Minecraft thanks to Piper Kit, a device that helps students build their own computer, start playing Minecraft and, doing this, learn to code. It 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, which is based in San Francisco and started in 2014, plans to make use of the funding to launch PiperEDU, a variant of Piper specifically designed for classrooms with a K-12 age. Each regular Piper kit includes a Raspberry Pi 3 microcomputer, an LCD display as well as a powerbank, speaker, and an oak case that is the computer's chassis. Piper Block, the education-friendly version, includes additional parts to ensure that there are no mishaps in the classroom. Piper has also hired curriculum developers to create professional development and activities that meet the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. These will also be part of the new product.
PiperEDU is also available at a reduced price. A standard Piper kit costs $300. PiperEDU is $250 when a school purchases four units. Teachers can lease Piper kits on a regular basis for $100 per month, or they can make use of the rental fees to finance a purchase.
In the past 18 months, the company has seen rapid growth. Piper graduated from the co.lab education accelerator in the end of 2014. Piper launched a successful Kickstarter, raising $280,000 by the end of April. In the meantime he was working on the first version. It sold 1300 units during Kickstarter and 1700 more during the remainder of 2015. Mark Pavlyukovskyy is the co-founder of Piper is predicting that Piper will ship anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 total kits in 2016, particularly due to Christmas being the biggest driver of the sales last year.
Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's personal educational endeavors and misadventures. He was implementing an interactive healthcare program in Ghana in 2012 when he became ill with what doctors believed was cerebral malaria. He was evacuated to England. While in a frenzied dream, he assessed his life and realized that it was possible to have a greater impact as a programmer than as an advocate for public health. He was recovered and was able to learn programming on his own.
Pavlyukovskyy thought that the next step was to offer this opportunity to children. He thought, "If i can teach myself, why not others!" He tried the idea in India and Ghana using the new Raspberry Pi microcontroller but it was too expensive for emerging communities. He said, "Besides, I was simply shipping components."
He focused his attention on the US, but crashed into another hurdle: children were keen to play Minecraft more than they wanted to construct computers or learn how to code. The makers of Raspberry Pi were already ahead of him. They had released Minecraft Pi which is a unique Minecraft server that runs on the Raspberry Pi, at the end of 2012.