A Makerbot In Every Classroom 152
Daniel_Stuckey writes "At the start of this year, President Obama nicely summed up the grandiose promise of 3D printing — or rather, the hype surrounding it. In his State of the Union address the president suggested the fledgling technology could save manufacturing by ushering in a second industrial revolution. That shout-out inspired a spate of buzzkill blog posts pointing out — rightly enough — that despite its potential, 3D printing is still in its infancy. It's not the panacea for the struggling economy we want it to be, at least not yet. Apparently the naysayers weren't enough to kill the 3D-printing dream, because, with support from the federal government, MakerBot announced its initiative to put a 3D printer in every school in America. The tech startup and the administration are betting big that teaching kids 3D printing is teaching them the skills they'll need as tomorrow's engineers, designers, and inventors."
Caveat: Makerbot no longer produces open hardware, and they are pushing proprietary Autodesk software and educational materials as part of the free 3D printer. Makerbot also launched a call for open models of math manipulatives on Thingiverse (you might remember them from elementary school) so that teachers have something useful to print immediately.
Makerbot Not For Kids (Score:3, Interesting)
If you think you can unpack a makerbot, press the button and start printing Eiffel towers, you need to get out more.
It's definitely a DIY machine and produces more failures than successes.
Another gizmo to be funded by taxpayers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since 1962 the per-pupil costs of public schools has quadrupled [ed.gov] (inlation-adjusted — the nominal increase is 25-times!), while the results remain just as — if not even more — disappointing. Indeed, merely 30% of 8th-graders are deemed proficient in reading [mediamatters.org]. Will a "makerbot" help solve this fundamental problem? Somehow I doubt it...
Re:I didn't know (Score:4, Interesting)
Who will teach them? (Score:4, Interesting)
My high school had a 1 million dollar computer lab gifted to it. That was quite a bit in 1990s money considering that I had a graduating class of under 40! The problem was that the only teacher who knew anything about computers was the band teacher. He was good, don't get me wrong but his musical love/responsiblities came first and he didn't really have time to teach computer class. After he struggled to fit in a programming class for 1 semester he realized he couldn't do it. After that about the most advanced thing in the room was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!
Maybe school teachers are more techically proficient today? I doubt it! Even if they are.. with all the finiky settings that go into getting a 3d printer to work right, and all the failure prone parts that go into one... I don't see how this can possibly work!