Jun 26, 2017 | By Julia
3D printer manufacturer MakerBot has set its sights squarely on the education sector with the launch of My MakerBot, a new cloud-enabled, browser-based printer monitoring platform compatible with Google Chomebooks and Autodesk’s Tinkercad 3D design software. Students will be able to start 3D prints and monitor their 3D printers from their classroom’s Google Chromebooks, simple laptops that are becoming immensely popular in today’s STEM education.
“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,” explains MakerBot CEO Nadav Goshen.
Goshen says the new My MakerBot platform is part of MakerBot’s continued focus on these emerging consumer needs, and lies at the core of the company’s education efforts to “dramatically improve student access to 3D printers.”
The web-based platform promises to efficiently streamline classrooms and makerspaces that manage multiple 3D printers. By enabling users to prepare and start prints, monitor 3D printers, manage Thingiverse accounts, and oversee purchasing and pending support cases from a single dashboard, My MakerBot is a clear message that MakerBot is taking 3D printing education very seriously.
“It’s now possible for students take their ideas from a lesson plan, to 3D design, all the way to 3D printing on a Chromebook,” say MakerBot reps in a statement.
In fact, lesson plans are emerging as a central feature in the new MakerBot initiative, as the company concurrently releases the MakerBot Educators Guidebook, a guide for teachers that includes tons of lesson plans and nine different 3D printing projects. While impressive on their own, these nine projects contained in the new Guidebook are just a teaser, “a small sampling of hundreds of lesson plans” that educators can already access through the Thingiverse Education portal.
So far things are already off to a strong start. Recently it was reported that 14,000 lesson plans were downloaded by teachers in the last month alone. And with My MakerBot on the horizon, the 3D printing company is hedging its bets on a successful year, both in terms of education and profits. My MakerBot is expected to be available and widely implemented for the start of the 2017 school year.
In the meantime, you can catch a sneak preview of the new education platform at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference in San Antonio this week. Look for MakerBot at booth #600.
Posted in 3D Software
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