Piper: Blending physical and digital worlds to elevate early STEM education
About Piper
Piper is an EdTech company that provides young students with opportunities to further their STEM knowledge in fun and engaging ways. The Piper Computer Kit teaches hardware engineering skills, while Piper Make enables coding knowledge development for a wide range of educational communities.
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Contact usPiper builds with Google Cloud and partners with Google for Education to help young students develop valuable coding and hardware skills.
Google Cloud results
- Expands reach of Piper Make through ubiquity of Chromebooks in classrooms
- Enhances educational experiences through blended learning of physical and digital skills
- Delivers Piper resources and solutions to underserved areas through global Google Cloud reach
Brings advanced technologies to classrooms globally
Young students benefit a lot from educational activities that seamlessly blend visual and auditory learning with more hands-on, fun sensory elements. From keeping students engaged and improving their comprehension, blended learning approaches have been especially effective and popular in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) studies.
Piper, a Google for Education partner, was born out of the desire to get more younger students excited about STEM. The company was founded a few years after co-founder, Shree Bose, won the grand prize in the inaugural Google Science Fair in 2011.
“I was lucky enough to have a global platform to talk about the importance of STEM education at an early age,” says Shree Bose, co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Piper. “I realized that a lot of young students were passionate about STEM, but they didn’t have good tools to bring their inspirations to life. This was one of the main motivations for launching Piper.”
Piper launched with its highly popular Piper Computer Kit, which gave students an opportunity to build their own computers and learn about electronics, coding, and computer science. Following on the success of the kit, the company then developed Piper Make, a browser-based editor to introduce young students to Python coding and DevOps.
Piper decided to partner with Google Cloud to scale its internal IT systems and with Google for Education to dramatically increase the availability of Piper Make to students globally.
“We use Google Blockly to run all of the drag-and-drop block coding programming because it’s the best option out there.”
—Shree Bose, co-founder, PiperBringing cloud-based, kid-friendly coding education to more students
Piper Make was a big change of direction for the company, as it had traditionally worked in direct-to-consumer electronics manufacturing and selling. As such, Piper had to overhaul its technology stack to support the new offering. Solutions including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Google Blockly were vital to supporting the success of Piper Make as the company looked to offer the service to students worldwide, including pending launches in some of the largest EdTech markets on the planet where demand at scale will be far beyond what Piper has serviced to date.
“In our view, no other technology company has a world-class cloud infrastructure that compares to Google Cloud,” says David Lundgren, Chief Executive Officer at Piper. “GKE is highly competitive with all of its Kubernetes services, and it’s not just that. The fact that all of this infrastructure is thoroughly entrenched in an education platform made all of the difference for us.”
Piper migrated a Google Blockly-based visual coding tutorial and project website to Google Cloud for its Piper Make launch. It took about a month to migrate over to Google Cloud, with no service disruptions or technical setbacks. Piper had also migrated much of its hosting to Google Cloud to manage the greater load on servers following the Piper Make rollout.
The company immediately took advantage of the myriad benefits of working with Google Cloud, tapping into the environment’s powerful architecture, service and support, responsiveness, and documentation. It is now expecting to integrate more services, including single sign-on, Google Classroom APIs, and Google Drive.
“The technical and engagement support Google offered us in the first month dwarfed what our previous cloud provider provided in a year,” says David. "The support for turning Piper Make into a progressive web app (PWA) to enable students to take their Chromebooks and Makes beyond the reach of the internet for data capture was especially valuable."
Google Cloud support staff walked Piper through the migration process to avoid service disruptions, and also connected Piper to other Google teams such as Education and ChromeOS to create an even more powerful partnership.
With its infrastructure running on Google Cloud, Piper began pushing the boundaries of possibility when it came to using Google Chromebooks in education.
Google Cloud GitHub integrations along with Firebase Hosting allow Piper’s relatively small team to make a big impact. Web Serial API helped solve compatibility issues that the company previously experienced, while the purely Google-based platform designed for Chromebooks and Google Classroom enabled fast time to market.
“Piper Make has deep ties to a lot of Google technologies,” says Shree. “We use Google Blockly to run all of the drag-and-drop block coding programming because it’s the best option out there. The ways that everything works seamlessly with Chrome OS and Chromebooks moves us closer to our vision of helping as many kids as possible in the world learn important skills through Piper Make.”
“Combining Piper Make with Raspberry Pi Pico and Chromebooks helps us to fulfill one of our core values of providing accessible, equitable education to all kids. We are able to reach many more students than was possible even a few years ago.”
—Shree Bose, co-founder, PiperMaximizing impact with affordable hardware and accessible software
Piper partners with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which offers a $5 microcontroller board that was a perfect fit for the Piper Make experience. Piper Make provides the Google-hosted web experience, while the Raspberry Pi Pico allows people to control functions of embedded systems. Bridging the gap between Raspberry Pi Pico and Chromebooks helps students get more out of their hardware.
“Google is unmatched in its commitment to education,” says David Lungren. “More than 80 percent of our classroom customers use Chromebooks, so it was an obvious choice to build Piper Make specifically for Chromebooks. Our longstanding relationship with Raspberry Pi put us in a great position to fulfill one of our core values of providing the lowest possible hardware cost to as many students as possible.”
The Web Serial API provides a communications link between Raspberry Pi and Chrome OS, enabling persistent code loading onto the microcontroller. Now, students using Piper Make can explore physical computing while reinforcing coding concepts in a way that reflects real-world experiences.
To expand adoption of Piper Make, the company rolled out its Monthly Makers Club, a subscription-based service that delivers hardware to students so they can more easily start and complete projects using Piper Make. Students can mix and match components to create new tools, all while learning coding and hardware engineering skills.
Taking this a step further, Piper released its Piper Extended Starter Kit which includes the Raspberry Pi Pico, breadboard, wires, resistors, LEDs, and the Sensor Explorer Kit with an ultrasonic rangefinder, color sensor, and temperature sensor to teach students concepts of time, speed, distance, frequency, temperature, color, and more—further uniting the physical sciences with digital education experiences. Virtually any sensor that can be combined with the Raspberry Pi Pico can be used to explore the physical world on Chromebooks using Piper Make.
“I’ve known for a long time that young students need a foundation in the physical world to really engage with digital technologies,” says Shree. “Combining Piper Make with Raspberry Pi Pico and Chromebooks helps us to fulfill one of our core values of providing accessible, equitable education to all kids. We are able to reach many more students than was possible even a few years ago.”
“Google and Raspberry Pi have opened the doors to a world of new opportunities. We will continue to improve upon our platform and innovate to give students more engaging, high-impact educational experiences.”
—Shree Bose, co-founder, PiperEmpowering students with data, educators with open source curriculum
Piper’s next big challenge will be to increase the volume of data students have available to them while enhancing the quality of analysis and insights delivered. Piper is currently looking into database solutions that would bring Cloud Storage to personal accounts, dramatically increasing how much information students can collect and use over time.
The company is also working to build further integrations with Google Classroom, leveraging APIs that will enable teachers and students to create and share their own coding blocks. This type of open sourcing will further increase educational opportunities afforded by Piper Make beyond its already robust 35 curricula offering.
At the same time, Piper is also exploring Google for Education partners to give students more integrated collaboration, documentation, and video tools.
“We’ve learned a lot about how to deliver exceptional STEM education to communities worldwide over the past few years,” says Shree. “Google and Raspberry Pi have opened the doors to a world of new opportunities. We will continue to improve upon our platform and innovate to give students even more engaging, high-impact educational experiences. It’s exciting to be where we are in the market today. We know it’s just the beginning of what we can offer to the education community worldwide.”
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About Piper
Piper is an EdTech company that provides young students with opportunities to further their STEM knowledge in fun and engaging ways. The Piper Computer Kit teaches hardware engineering skills, while Piper Make enables coding knowledge development for a wide range of educational communities.