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p>The possibilities for creating your own mini-computer are numerous. There are more coding tutorials than a single student would know what to do with. What is a student who is ambitious do? Where should a teacher begin? How do an edtech business owner determine which tools are the most efficient?

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p>Venture capitalists are betting that the horse that will win the race is Minecraft, thanks to Piper Kit, a computer that teaches students how to build their own computer, start playing Minecraft and, in doing this, 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).

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p>The company, located in San Francisco, was founded in 2014. It is planning to use the money to develop PiperEDU which is a version of Piper specifically designed for classrooms with a K-12 age. Each regular Piper kit includes an 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 version for schools, called Piper Block, also comes with extra parts to ensure that classroom mishaps don't cause the complete kit to be disabled. Piper has also hired curriculum developers to create professional development and activities that meet the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. These will be included in the new product.

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p>PiperEDU is also available at a discount. 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 they can make use of the rental fees to finance a purchase.

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p>In the last 18 months, the business has seen rapid growth. After graduating from the co.lab edugaming accelerator at 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 units during the remaining months of 2015. https://soundzpromising.com/ Piper co-founder Mark Pavlyukovskyy predicts Piper will deliver between 10,000 and 15,000 kits in 2016, especially with Christmas having boosted sales last year

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p>Piper began with Pavlyukovskyy's mishaps and educational pursuits. When he was developing a gamified health curriculum in Ghana in 2012, he fell ill with what doctors guessed was cerebral malaria. He was transferred to England. He was having a dream when he realized that he could have a greater impact as a programmer rather than as a public advocate for health. When he was fortunate enough to recover, he started teaching himself to program.

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p>The next obvious step, to Pavlyukovskyy was to offer children the chance to learn because Pavlyukovskyy thought, "If I can teach myself, then I can teach other people!" He tested the idea in India, Ghana and Kenya using the newest Raspberry Pi microcontroller, but the cost was too high for emerging communities. He added, "Besides, I was just shipping components."

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p>He turned his attention to 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 launched Minecraft Pi which is a unique Minecraft server that runs on the Raspberry Pi, at the end of 2012.

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