>>1002454
> kids are capable of more than that.
No they aren't. The best they will come up with by themselves is gluing junk together. You will need to give them guidance for some of them to get past that level, and from what you're saying it looks like nobody but you has those skills (even then your skills don't seem to be too great since you don't even get 3D printing). The question is do you have the time?

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>>1002454
So this is for an elementary school? Arent the oldest kids there like 3rd graders?

Regardless, if you want to run a 3D printer dont buy a makerbot. Lulzbots sell to a lot of schools ive heard, and youll be a lot better off.

When you buy a decent prebuilt printer like the Lulzbot, you will have decent software and references for print settings which makes printing easier. The only maintenance you will need to do is clean the occasional print head jam, or level the bed. Easy stuff.

There are different Gcode slicers, and a lot of them have options to tell you exactly how much filament will be used, and you can input the price and will tell you how much it will cost.
Its one way to do it, is charge people per print.

1kg of cheap filament is about 20$ a spool. Im doing a pretty big print right now, its an 8 hour print and its 300 grams of filament, almost a third of a roll.
Little nick nacks dont take too much filament, and less time, but still printing is a slow process.

Modelling designs is as hard as the model you want to do.
There are dead simple things you can use if you dont want to learn a real program.

https://www.tinkercad.com/

The biggest thing is understanding the 3d printing process, knowing the printers limits. Half of the battle in modelling 3d printer stuff is dealing with the printers limitations. Its great to design something perfect for printing, but a lot of times you have to resort to support material. Its a pain in the ass to remove and clean, and it wastes material. But the print would otherwise be impossible.

Its honestly not hard in general if you actually want to learn a bit about what you are doing.

>>1002482
It's K-5. The 4th and 5th graders would be able to handle this I think, or at least the magnet program kids would (I think roughly 50% of the student body?)

Thanks for the advice on the printer. I'm sure there's a bunch of resources for pre-made designs, right? Any value in just letting students print something (no modeling) to be exposed to the concept at this level?

>>1002490
https://www.youmagine.com/
http://www.thingiverse.com/
a few others

I guess the value in just printing out stuff is to get them interested in modelling or designing stuff. It wont be too long till someone gets an idea about something they could print to fix a problem. It honestly isnt THAT hard to model real basic stuff that will print easily.

Its not like you have the stupid kids either.

ask the teacher, they're the one who will actually do the work. if you're the teacher buy some legos

>>1002462
Absolutely this. I have minimal experience with hacker/maker spaces, but this post summed it up perfectly.

I'm not trying to discourage you. If you have the time and patience, you could inspire some great makers.

>>1002490
My school (k-12) had two robotics programs. One was k-6, and was glorified legos. The other was 7-12 and was basically run 100% by parents. I was involved with the latter, and legitimately tried to participate but was pushed aside.

Both sadden me. I urge you, no matter what you do to make it about the kids.

>>1002454
>I'm sure we need tools; any recommendations for tools that are both useful and won't cause children to kill themselves?

hammers
hand saws
drills/drivers
tape measures
glue
nails
wood

none of that is really expensive and even the dumb ones would have a hard time breaking a hammer

>>1002602
>Hand saws
>Drills

I know that I used these things under supervision when I was this age (so maybe I should trust these kids), but these definitely seem like a liability issue waiting to happen

>>1002611
supervision should be a given, and I'd assume there would be a waiver if even just a screwdriver is required

unless they're a bunch of ****bags, I doubt they'd be stupid enough to go around trying to stab each other with drills or perform amputations

hopefully the kind of kids will actually be those with some sense and not just ones people dumped to have someone babysit them

some basic safety instruction should be required, along with a test, before anyone even lays a finger on the tools

(unfortunately, back in shop class, it was not uncommon for it to become a dumping ground for the kid of morons who thought shooting nails out of an air gun was a good idea)

simple things like bird and bat houses are good projects, plus they can be actually put to use and are beneficial to the environment

>>1002560
Aptos?

>>1002454
When I was a six year old, I had a habit of taking garden equipment and gigantic cardboard boxes and duct tape to make huge race tracks for those little die cast cars. Imagine if I could make my own die-cast cars!

The issue that I imagine with fabrication is teaching the kids materials science. How will a guitar string harden? By cold work hardening. How will it break? By fatigue. How do you normally learn these things? By playing guitar regularly or having a good friend who does. Who actually picks up guitar nowadays? When I was little, 25% of the class and all male. How do females learn about fatigue if nothing they play with will break that way? I don't know.

You would start by educating parents with a basic materials science class they would attend under an authoritarian government under pain of death. Then you would ban Chinese-made toys, because you can't take them apart, they are 1-chip things (another thread on diy about that).

I also remember playing Kingdom Hearts way too much, especially its lego ship-building section. That is a kid obsessing over a few variables in a machine's operational capacities. Imagine a machine with silver-impregnated wax. A roller deposits a new layer of wax. A laser sinters it. Repeat. Imagine a child playing with focal width, wavelengths, substrate composition and the like. Certainly they can do this with the right front-end, even if they were 7 year olds. Just the machine would take time to make! Who knows how the laser should be made? I sure don't, but ask around in your community, you are on the board because your job is to be a central liason for skilled volunteers.

>>1003699
To take the experimenting to the extreme, imagine you had one of those common index of refraction experiments. Obviously, the concept of different positive refractive indices across various media presents itself. To build a whole computer simulation, you might define a lense with arbitrary non-intersecting 2-manifolds through which light travels, derive some partial differential equations, come up with your input and desires output, and numerically compute the solution. Or, an 11th grader can do the same thing without knowing any calculus, as I saw demonstrated in some science and math experimentation and simulation competition they have for kids in the UK, even visualizing the paths light traces, all with python.

A little kid can learn python, but a 5th grader is around 11 or 12 years old, and scarcely 0.1% of our population can say they started programming when they were 10,and usually in C or Basic or Javascript, and rarely to an interesting end. But have you seen how Java is sometimes introduced by controlling a turtle that waddles through a grid and deposits ink/lines? If the interface is simple enough, the kids will get it. A visual programming language would be ideal. Whatever tooling you have, the thing to do would be to find volunteers to to write C kernel drivers and C shared+object libraries in C, then export these libraries to a class scheme in JSON or XML and use this with a GObject-like framework for automatically building scaffolding for a new "lab tool" frontend in C. This should be short, I did something like this yesterday without the hardware size. Now you have a common definition for objects in both XML and C. Now write an exporter to generate classes for visual building blocks (flowgraph or DRAKON or whatever like https://scratch.mit.edu). Now write the gui, and there must be dozens of low-level programmers in your municipality who can do such a thing. Over the course of a few years, you will have a good result.

>>1002454
3D printing is a bit gimmicky. I would work more on teaching 3D modelling on computers. Outsource the printing to an online company. Once they have the modelling skill they can easily model things for 3D printers and build objects for virtual environments. My former middle school bought like 5 3D printers. It's a huge waste.

Raspberry Pi is great. Computer based electronics/logic simulators are better though because you never need more parts or lack enough parts. Maybe an education plug-in for minecraft. They all love minecraft. MIT also has a programming suite for kids that focuses on logic.

I worked with elementary kids after school doing lego robotics. I wish I had more time with them. They really didn't have enough basic knowledge to do much. They need to learn about logic, gears, basic electronic principles (magnetism, polarity, etc.).

My $5 cents aud. Im a tech ed teacher. We have a makerspace, run buy a random IT guy. Nice fella really, but he has been at sea since day one. 3d printers, laser cutter, a few soldering irons, piles of random junk and a vinyl cutter pretty make up the list. As a department we have used the laser to burn random stuff on wood, no other department has done anything more than "thats nice". Really its what we have been teaching since manual arts moved to design based work, and even prior to that, but with a wood burner lol. Really a makerspace is just eventually going to target the higher end kids that want to do our subjects, but cant due to the timetable lines restricting their access.
Oh, and provide me with amusement when the guys that dont know how to use shit screw up their 40k laser cutter with "common knowledge" fuckups. At least the repairs arent coming from my budget.

Use the money to make space for a FIRST Lego League Team and pay for the contests entry fee. Parents in my area love the team because it's a few more hours to work and be away from their rugrats. Kids love it because they're building Legos to do something with purpose. After the tournament they'll be hooked.

The first entry fee will include everything you need to build in Legos including a mindstorm controller, a raspberry pi level computer but simpler programming. From there you can get the printer and Tools to support the team and creative challenges you'll need to come up with to keep the kids interested throughout the year.

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Im starting to volunteer at a makerspace at a local after school center. They have a vinyl cutter, a 3d printer, a pancake printer (???), an xcarve, green screen, and a heat press. They have a summer curriculum that is 8 weeks of about 14 kids in at a time (1-3 times a day) but the kids range from 7 years old to teens. The person working there is mostly concerned with making a video with the students and focusing all efforts into that (props on the 3d printer for example). In fact, specifics about even the movie are hazy so I have been trying to come up with ideas for projects that either backup the movie or move into a different direction. I am a bit more /g/ so I was thinking making a website in elm and learning basic programming stuff while also having something to show friends and family online. I like the tinkercad recommendation and was thinking of teaching some students some design stuff but the age group is really hard to pin down. Pancake making seems fun but hardly something that can last 8 weeks, maybe more like a morning activity before moving on the real stuff. They have some knockoff Lego mindstorms so may be a robotics thing could work (I haven't played around with it yet tho). I also have a raspberry pi 3 and have started reading over some of their educational materials but they aren't very specific ("look at this raspberry pi.... in space!!") I haven't worked with kids yet so I don't know about their digital literacy level or how to teach / work with students of a mixed age group. Any thoughts? This seems like the perfect thread. I'll be watching / contributing anything I find.

>>1004050
Out school already has a Lego robotics team, and they typically place/win at state competition. Our parents are well to do and highly motivated which is why they want to do something a level above that.

We had a group of our elementary students win a $20k scholarship from MIT for an app they developed. I think they want to see more stuff like that, which is why they are pushing for a maker space.

The biggest hurdle in my mind is that tools are useless without ideas of things to create, and I don't know how to fill students' heads with that.