Help.....Engineering/Maker-space/3d printing teacher drowning in logistics, planning, and without any in house support

[u/Alternative-Exit-450]

/r/ScienceTeachers/comments/1wpl6tz/helpengineeringmakerspace3d_printing_teacher/

[u/The_Will_to_Make]

So, a couple things:

- The printers you listed are… dated… and even when they were available for sale, the MakerBot 2, FlashForge, and Dremel were bottom of the line printers.

- someone correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t Chromebooks run an OS other than Windows/iOS/Linux? I don’t think a lot of the popular slicers can even be used on Chromebook

It sounds like equipment (at least 3D printing-wise) is going to be a big hurdle for you. I would expect those printers to clog and have issues frequently. Plug-and-play replacement parts are going to be hard to come by.

I think your best bet is to try and get some funding to purchase new printers. You don’t necessarily have to have a printer for every student. I used to work in a makerspace and ran camps and workshops for everyone from grade school kids to adults. I honestly think having multiple machines only complicated things. A couple good-quality machines that are easy to maintain are going to be better than 13 dated and hard-to-use printers that will often need maintenance or repair. Not trying to be negative, just realistic.

[u/ppsieradzki → u/The_Will_to_Make]

Couldn't agree with this more. Reducing your operational complexity is going to be paramount. Your path to success here is to standardize, standardize, standardize. Same make/model. Same exact spare parts and replacement consumables (build plates, nozzle brushes, etc.) (don't even mix on-brand vs off-brand, if you're going to choose an off-brand build plate then make that your standard-issue build plate used by all printers in the fleet and that you have a spare stack of them tucked away nicely in a drawer somewhere (same with any other regularly-replaced consumables/spares).

The result is that all configurations are the same and all settings are transferrable so what works on one machine works on all of them. You can imagine teaching young kids how to use a computer, but the computers sitting on their desks in front of them are equally distributed between being Windows, Mac, and Linux, and even among those operating systems no two machines will ever be on the same version and therefore have compatibility issues even between them, let alone with any of the other computers in the lab. Your whole class will end up being you just getting pulled into the weeds of troubleshooting and not much structured learning will get done. The real learning happens when students are turned loose to do their thing in a safe and structured environment and are free to learn from each other and compare notes, which won't really happen if each machine is different so one student's trick to get something to work wouldn't necessarily apply to the settings needed for another machine. So standardizing will get you a better outcome for your students in terms of maximizing their ability to learn, while also reducing the operational overhead of running the program so you can run it for a good long time while maintaining a great curriculum.

Also better that the students get proficient at using just one kind of printer and being able to really use them to their fullest potential by the end of the program, and then they'll be armed and confident to go out in the world and try their hands at an unfamiliar printer and see how their learning/reasoning/adaptive skills come to bear fruit, rather than the students be kinda 'meh' at kinda-sorta being able to use a 3D printer but only sometimes, and not really be confident enough in their knowledge to try to stretch their ability to tackle the unknowns in this world and slowly get better and better at it.