High School Teacher Looking to Check Out Your 3D Printer for Research (Page 2 of 2)

I think that you could be working a little too rigidly danny.

Kids will either love the concept of this, or not care. If the class is compulsory then make it that not all students have to print something, Allow students come in out of class hours, either during lunch times or after school. Make a 3D printing club. It sounds like Shane is enthused and supportive of this idea, but not all students will be. You give students the chance, and take the ones who grab it.

Making printing a design optional for the class, give them times to come in and get it printed if they want, but it does not effect their grade. Take the students who are captivated and grow them into mentors and managers to run the printer out of hours.

When I was at secondary/high school. I spent almost all of my lunch times in the design and tech department. Either using computers to program or hack the network (out of boredom), or making things. Schools have become far too rigid, with standardised testing, let this be a little bit of hope to students like myself. Who were so mind numbingly bored with most of the "tech stuff", and took our frustration out on hacking the IT network. Don't write all the kids off as short attention span luddites, there are plenty of kids around who just need the chance. In one Tech lesson when we were given these awesome generic lego sets. I built a set of wipers connected to a 3 speed gearbox, with a reverse gear. I was so proud of it, but also frustrated that this was just through my own intuition and self taught knowledge. Nothing in the school curriculum attributed to it. I wanted to be taught more about these things, but felt there was no-one to help me.

When I was in high school 20 some odd years ago, we had a machine shop and a electronics lab.  You could forego a study period to take "Independent Study Machining" or Electronics.  The class consisted of myself, one friend, and one instructor who would start us off in the beginning of the class, eat lunch, and come back at the end. 

They gave us a robotic arm, a conveyor belt, and a small hobby cnc mill through donations.  We made an assembly line that would mill our school logo out of plexiglass and sold them in the school store.  All of this was done through manuals, trial and error and very little guidance from our instructor.  Remember this is pre-internet so if you don't know you just have to figure it out.

Moral of the story is:  If they are interested, kids can accomplish a lot more than you think.  Add access to the internet and I wouldn't put anything past them.

I think it's a little soon for that, they need to catch up on orders first.  But I would think it's a good long term strategy.  Get people used to you so when they leave for other places they have a comfort level and hopefully a loyalty.

I completely agree with you that the Solidoodle would be VERY beneficial to a HS Tech program. Some students really like to play around and tinker while other are oblivious like you said.

Having 3+ printers is the ideal situation due to the amount of time it takes to print a model. The reason for this is because having 25+ students it will take over a month Per class to get a model printed... I do have to comment on the idea of having a quality Replicator 2. It would be great to have 1 quality printer in the class but I feel the students in an engineering or design class should also be using the printers in a hands on way.

Good call on the preheated glass. Ill keep it in mind. As for fundraising,  unfortunately all the money that is raised must be done through a club and the club that is associated with our tech ed department is TSA. I love this club bc students get to compete in in real world problems. They get to compete first locally at the school, then at states and then at nationals. As you can imagine this gets expensive so the current adviser allocates all the funds to go directly to paying for travel and other expenses.

I was in TSA at my High School.  There would be tons of benefits in having a 3-D printer in that program. You might start calling some of these 3d printer companies and finding out if they have any special pricing for schools.

Would be AWESOME!

I agree that not everyone will enthused and grab on. But I'm there to expose them to all of the different engineering design processes that the world is using. The first project they would still be required to complete for a grade. Anything after that they would utilize it based on their need through their designs only. (they dont have to use it if their design doesnt require it)

This is the goal. I have some students that are already in that role with some other equipment.

Maybe I wasn't too clear,

I'm not that old (only 30) so the experience of education is not "that" far behind me.
Most schools do not have extensive STEM program's, mine did.

We had a wood working shop with lathes, there were metal lathes in the metal shop. Milling machines pillar drills a proper electronics lab where we photo etched boards.
We had a computer control room.
These were stocked with old acorns that we did computer control on, mostly it was programming traffic lights etc, the breakout board for the machines allowed us to actually "see and do" making computer controlled traffic systems.

We also had a cnc milling machine and a cnc lathe,

Nobody ever used them. I saw them used once, by a teacher.

I live about 8 miles from silverstone (race track) thy used to run a competition to build a radio controlled car. That's the only after school club that I ever saw in stem that was successfully attended by students.
The cnc mill was used to produce a arms for suspension from acrylic.

I really think the fused filament printers will end up bing a similar curiosity item in tech rooms, a little too complicated for students to learn a little too fiddley to maintain.

I've been following 3D punting for a long time (since I read about Adrian bowyers first Darwin machine in a staff news letter whilst I was working at UoB)

I did immediately see the potential for use in schools the same as everyone else has. But the honest truth is that the reality likely isn't going to live up to the dream.

The biggest problems are:
The software, you're going to teach kids how to use autocad in highschool? Good luck with that! (I assume that'll be extra classes I mean you still have to teach 2D design and drafting first?!

Then you have to go through all the design configurations re overhangs and support material.

Then the biggest killer is the time it'll actually take to print!

And machine maintenance,

As I said before 3D printing in schools? -yes.

Fused filament 3D printing? I can't see it, laser sintering is just so much easier to show more foolproof etc.

you can abuse it quite easily with the manual controls, its pretty easy to crash the extruder into the printed part

did it myself, 10mm up on the z .. not down, down is up .. doh!

Weighing in late, but here it is from horses mouth:

The Solidoodle is already used in schools to great effect. Yes, we do offer an educational discount.
While we typically do not take part in the individual curriculum development, we have seen some
great programs put together with the Solidoodle.

Let us know if there are any questions on Solidoodle's and education.