Do You or Your Kids Have a 3D Printer in School?

So My son's school finally got their first 3D printer. It's a Makerbot Replicator 2. He is in the 10th grade and the school so far has one printer. He just got his first project working with it. He's working in a group to create an "Invention," I think I'm more excited than he is. We live in Tamp Florida By the way.

Anyone else have a kid who's school has one or several printers, or perhaps you are the student, do you have one in your school? If not, have you talked to the school about perhaps getting one?

In my opinion these things are likely the best new learning devices since Apple started bringing their computers into schools in the late 80's

I don't have any kids yet, but the few children I know actually do have access to 3D Printers here South Florida. I can not agree more with you that 3D printing is the wave of the future when it comes to education. Hands on education is what is needed in American schools, and that's exactly what 3D printers give children.

I mentioned this in another post but will summarize it again here.

I was an Industrial Arts and Technology teacher for 35 years. Every class I taught was a hands on, students producing projects class! Wood Shop, Metal Shop, Printing, Photography, Mechanical Drawing, etc. all classes had a in hands result to my students.

While I love the idea of a 3D printer, having only one or two in a class of middle school or high school students would probably be very frustrating. It is such a timely process that most complex projects would take several class periods to print. If there were several classes in a day, it would end up being tied up by the earliest class. I often had three or four sections of the same subject during the day.

Yes, I realize a great amount of time could be taken up with teaching creating a project in 3D Software, but inevitably, every student wants to show off a finished product. When you factor in failed prints, jams and tweaking the printer, it seems like an incredibly frustrating idea from a teacher's perspective.

Don't get me wrong, I love my 3D Printers and enjoy teaching how to build the printers but I am glad I am not teaching a design and printing class to 50 or 100 kids! That's just my .02