Tech City’s pi-top has launched an Indiegogo campaign to help fund its latest creation, the pi-topCEED, a $99 Raspberry Pi-powered desktop computer designed to get kids coding.
The company has built its own pi-topOS using Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian programming language as the basis and the kit comes with a 13.3-inch HD LCD screen.
The pi-top CEED is compatible with the school curriculum, offering ‘GCSE driven Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game’ for learning to code and building hardware.
pi-top was founded by a team of graduates from the Entrepreneur First programme.
They then went through the three-month Emerge Education edtech accelerator and received almost $40,000 in seed funding from the company’s venture fund back in January.
pi-top has partnered with the charity IntoUniversity.org for the launch of the campaign to offer a ‘buy one, gift one’ deal for backers, where they can pay an additional $50 to give a pi-topCEED to a disadvantaged young person.
“I’d love to see a pi-topCEED in every classroom,” said Eben Upton, founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi, the credit card-sized computer’s commercial arm.
This launch comes hot on the heels of a £5m edtech fund unveiled by Boris Johnson last week to “tackle the emerging gap between the skills young Londoners have or are being equipped with and what employers say they need in order to sustain London’s growth”.
The Digital Talent Programme will work with young Londoners aged 14 to 24 so that they are best placed to take advantage of the capital’s tech boom by creating links between educators and industry.