I am looking to expand my Makerspace with in my school with a 3D Printing System. Can anyone help point me in the right direction. I am using a Makerbot Replicator 2 at this time.
What exactly is a “3D Printing System”? Are you saying another 3D printer? Or are you looking for something like a whole classroom setup with course material, etc?
I am looking to replace the printer I am using now. I will also be looking for Course material for middle school classes. Thanks for any help with this.
There are lots of different “right” directions you could go. Depends on what you want out of it. I support schools in my local area for keeping their printers running. I like to keep them simple, maintainable, and as open source as possible.
Honestly, there isn’t much reason to replace the printer you’re using now as long as it works. If you’re looking for a software toolchain/printer that works well together I’d suggest the Ultimaker/Cura set. Unfortunately they aren’t really a stateside operation so that can hinder educational purchasing.
Printrbot offers educational discounts as well, and with their printers being cheap (as in cost, they are very well built machines!), you could probably afford to buy multiples of them – parallelizing the printing experience would certainly let more kids experience what it has to offer. Having 30-120 kids to a single printer is somewhat time consuming. Having 5-10 printrbots spread across classes or even in a single class would potentially allow more, faster iteration on kids ideas.
The educational side is somewhat lacking. Proper course materials, etc are something that 3D printer companies don’t quite have a grasp of yet. We need collaboration between teachers, schools, etc to be able to offer these kinds of things to other schools and advance the educational horizons of our students.
Second Printrbot. Their bang for the buck is awesome and their CEO Brook hangs around this community a lot. Glad to see the Takerbot getting replaced!