Every year we get the same phone call from a teacher: “We bought a 3D printer, it’s been sitting in a cupboard for eight months, and no one knows where to start.”
This happens because a printer by itself is not a lab. Here is how it works when it actually works.
THE PROBLEM ISN’T THE MACHINE
A school-grade 3D printer today costs less than a projector. That’s not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is that you need someone who knows: what material to use in a classroom full of kids, how to set up a slicer, what to do when the part detaches from the bed, and above all, what to have the kids design so that the lesson doesn’t turn into “watch the machine print a keychain.”
That part can’t be bought with the printer. That’s why most school printers end up in the cupboard.
HOW WE WORK WITH SCHOOLS
We’ve been doing 3D printing every day since we opened in 2020, and our lab is in San Vito dei Normanni. When we go into a school, we bring three things:
The software, which is free
We start with Tinkercad: it works in the browser, nothing needs to be installed, it costs nothing, and an eleven-year-old can get the hang of it in one lesson. From there, you move up to FreeCAD or OpenSCAD, which are also free and open-source, or to Fusion and Onshape with student licenses.
No school has to buy licenses to run a modeling lab. It’s useful to know this before writing the project.
A real object to design
This is where the difference between a lab that works and one that bores lies. A replacement part for something that actually broke at that school. A mount for a tool in the physics lab. An object that solves a problem the kids have seen with their own eyes.
When the project has a recipient, motivation doesn’t need to be searched for: it’s already there.
The connection with what they are already studying
3D modeling isn’t an extra subject. It’s solid geometry that you can touch, technical drawing that corrects itself, and the design process—define a problem, try a solution, print it, it doesn’t work, redo it. The cycle of error and correction is the point, not the printing.
HOW IT’S FUNDED
We aren’t grant consultants and we don’t sell applications: here we only tell you what we see schools do with the ones we work with.
3D printing labs typically fall under funding lines dedicated to innovative learning environments and STEM and digital skills—the names change with every programming cycle, so the sensible thing is to ask the school’s administrative director which calls for proposals are open at that moment and which funding line the activity can be supported by.
What we can do is the part that is usually missing when the application is filled out: the detailed quote and the technical description of the activities, with hours, materials, and objectives, in the format needed by whoever is writing the project. We prepare that for you, free of charge, even if the application doesn’t get approved.
AND IF YOU WANT TO START WITH WHAT A KID CAN DO
Before organizing a lab, it’s often best to see what happens if you give them the opportunity. That’s why we set up Junior Creator, the free contest for under-16s in Brindisi, Lecce, and Taranto: you design an object, explain why, and the prize is a 3D printer with twelve hours of training.
The school doesn’t need to do anything: the kids participate. But offering it to a class is the most affordable way we know to find out who in that classroom has the right mindset.
🏫 Are you a school? Write to us on WhatsApp or via the contact form: we’ll prepare the detailed quote with hours, materials, and educational objectives, in the format needed for the project. The quote is free, even if nothing comes of it.
