#3
Be the MANAGER of your Students’ Prints
You can be prepared, have your printer, and complete your training but what happens when you have 30+ student designs to 3D print and a limited amount of time?
Based on a workflow that is best practice for our school, students submit a Google form for any print jobs they would like, and I send the print jobs to the MakerBot printers. This is due to the fact that:
1. Students are not in my classroom full time and teachers do not want their instruction interrupted to have their kids pulled out to begin/end a print job for technical reasons. It is understandable, and my goal is to support teachers, not to impede their curriculum goals.
2. Kids aren’t always around when I start/finish their projects even though they have designed them. My travel schedule is such that oftentimes I must begin/end a print job before/after school hours to expedite print jobs.
3. I can pull together print jobs of the same color to increase output. Giving students the understanding that they may not be able to choose what color their design is printed in can help to streamline the process.
4. I try to catch all student design errors before printing occurs. There are much fewer ‘misprints’ when I run the designs through the MakerBot Print software to scan for mistakes. This helps me save on materials and time in the long run.
You can use flash drives, local storage, google classroom, Office365 or other workflows that suit your personal preferences.
Takeaway…
The number of skills my students acquired while using MakerBots 3D printers in a short amount of time has been astonishing and it inspired my own professional development as I learned alongside them. My students cannot get enough of 3D printing ー and yours won’t be able to either.
