I just wrote an article for teachers about what I would recommend for a $500 3D Printer Grant. What recommendations would you make for a teacher interested in bringing 3D printing into the classroom?
http://designmaketeach.com/2013/09/25/writing-a-500-3d-printer-grant/
My big question is, what curriculum does 3D printing fit into, where $500 is the largest amount that would be given? If it’s pre-college, I don’t know of any high schools which teach 3D modeling. There is art, but increasingly schools are axing it, and they would really be needing a 3D scanner as well.
Don’t get me wrong, I practically live and breathe 3D printing, but I haven’t found any practical instances where it would be the center of a class.
In the UK they are starting to teach it along side CAD, woodwork and metal work. I’m hoping to help out the local high school with printed parts as they would also use for art to.
Nice and well written article, I have recently purchased the pritrbot simple because of its lowest preice 199$, but surprised now the total owning cost is about $500 as you have said in the post.
@John_Ridley not a single one. I live in Florida, in a place where the most advanced computer related course here is Microsoft Word. I’m sure some of the larger area schools have this kind of stuff, but I’ve never seen it. 
Grants for supplies makes sense. Grants for a printer makes little sense unless you have a staff member or parent willing to spend a LOT of unpaid hours tinkering. If Techshop has a hard enough time keeping their expensive Makerbots running then a random school has no hope. Printers are getting better, but they are not good enough (yet) to hand off to classrooms.
I work and live in Galicia, Spain. Last year we assembled and worked with a RepRap Prusa 2 with kids about 15-16 years. It was a class of 7 boys and girls, and it was a great experience both for me and for them. We fit it in a subject called something like “technology”, since we (not for much longer) have great freedom to do what we decide in our classes.
Even it didn’t gave us the best printing quality and we had a lot of issues, we learned tons of things in a different way while we constructed it, and it was hugely motivational for the students.
So, my vote for RepRaps. 
Yes, this year we’re going for the i3!
I think it would be interesting to look at the value of a printer in the context of a geometry class. The focus would be on use of the software to understand concepts like rotate, translate, scale, union, difference, equations for the various shapes, etc. I would not focus on building the printer, but rather on using 3d modeling software and letting the kids print the creations they made in the software. Modeling makes the usefulness of these concepts obvious - to make your design, you have to understand the underlying geometry. Printing the designs makes the results tangible.
Its a great idea, I agree with much of the comments above though, it will depend vastly on the region and the school’s objectives to whether they will accept it.
I’ve attended many schools in NorCal and their focus is generally a very wide range of focus on General Education for rounded students to transfer outside of the region in various careers.
In SoCal, LAUSD in particular for the greater Los Angeles Area- they tend to focus on the absolute minimum efforts to teach the minimum necessary information, to push kids out the door. A lot of it is centered around biased or indoctrinated information and cultural/ social studies in specific.
If your area or school has a respect for technology, art, science or hands on working skills, they would probably accept this kind of idea.