3D Printing in the Classroom with my "Borrowed" Printer

I finally did it.

I have a 3D printer in my classroom!

While this is normal for many teachers in technology, I don't teach technology, so I'm not one of those lucky few.

I teach special education, which means we usually work with outdated curriculum that the general education teachers deemed was not appropriate to teach to their students. Or most commonly, I'm trying to create my own curriculum on a daily basis.

Two years ago the shop teacher got to buy a 3D printer for the school, and used it for a while before he quit. The next shop teacher couldn't figure out how to use it, so it sat for the entire year. I gritted my teeth every time I walked past his windows and looked at the poor printer, sitting, no more useful than another paperweight on the table. But then that teacher quit too.

So I basically went to our tech director and kindly said "let me have the printer", since I'm not going anywhere, and I can learn how to use it and teach others. So with the help of my students, we got it working, and are actively printing on a daily basis.

While this seems like a pretty small deal, getting this printer is huge for me. My dad was a plastics tooling engineer for 50 years. He bought his first 3D printer before most people had ever heard of them. I could always bring him projects I wanted printed and he would create them for me. Making things was where we connected. And then last summer I lost him to pancreatic cancer. I knew he wanted me to learn the complexitities of CAD and 3D printing, but I never had. Even when I brought the printer to our classroom, I had serious doubts of whether I could get it to work, or would I have to call in some guy to help me.

But nope. I did it.

With the help from my students in special education who are also generally underestimated and assumed to be "below standard". Well this time, we proved them wrong. I'll be posting our projects so that the world can see what we've done, and to hopefully raise a little Steem so we can buy our OWN 3D printer that we'll never have to give back to the tech department!