“This development is part of our continued focus on customers needs, and is at the core of our efforts in education to dramatically improve student access to 3D printers,” said MakerBot CEO Nadav Goshen. “As more and more districts adopt Chromebooks and rely on web-based apps, 3D printers are being implemented in those same classrooms – making fully connected, cloud-based 3D printing more important than ever for both teachers and students.”
The platform connects a classroom’s connected 3D printers, Thingiverse Education account, purchasing, and pending support cases, and allows users to import and prepare 3D files, start print jobs, and monitor the print progress from a single dashboard. Now students can move their ideas from lesson plans to 3D designs and 3D printed objects, just using a classroom Chromebook, and teachers can easily manage the use of classroom 3D printing.
MakerBot also worked with Autodesk Tinkercad to connect the K-12 design software right to the My MakerBot platform, so students can create their own 3D models, export their designs directly to the platform, and 3D print them without having to leave the web browser.
“By connecting two powerful STEM learning tools, we’re empowering educators so that they can equip students with critical problem solving skills,” MakerBot PR Manager Josh Snider explained.
The guidebook offers teachers much-needed support in introducing 3D printing technology to their students, and each project lists step-by-step instructions, which core standards they fulfill, and helpful author notes to guide teachers from the beginning of the projects to the end.
The included projects are just a small offering of the nearly 300 lesson plans currently available on Thingiverse Education, which is the largest online portal for educators to find classroom 3D printing content.
“3D printers aren’t the center of classrooms, students are,” wrote Snider. “That’s why MakerBot is always working to set new standards in ease-of-use and reliability while connecting teachers to high quality curriculum and the largest community of 3D printing educators.”
You can download the first project, “Cloud Types,” for free to get an early preview of the guidebook.
The Chromebook-compatible My MakerBot platform and the MakerBot Educators Guidebook will be widely available for classroom use by the start of the 2017-2018 school year. Also, these two new 3D printing education solutions will be showcased this week at MakerBot’s booth #600 at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference in San Antonio. Discuss in the MakerBot forum at 3DPB.com.