Slashdot Mirror
Report: Chinese Government Plans To Put 3D Printers In All Elementary Schools
InfiniteZero writes The Chinese government has a new plan to install a 3D printer in each of its approximately 400,000 elementary schools over the next two years. Education is probably one of the areas that will benefit the most from 3D printers in the long run. The problem though is getting the machines into the schools in the first place. With prices generally ranging from $400 to $3,000 for typical desktop 3D printers, they are not cheap, and with budgets within many school districts running dry, both in the United States and overseas, the unfortunate fact is that many schools simply can’t afford them, not to mention the materials and time it takes to train teachers to use them.
These are unsubstantiated claims, and basically there is a 0% chance this is true. This should set your BS alarms ringing pretty loud.
1886 Mimeograph
1923 Spirit duplicator
2015 3D printer
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Good to see it's not just the US that wastes money on expensive technology-related boondoggles that don't appreciably translate to improved education.
With China’s recent plan for education, the ball is now clearly in Obama’s court. With a little under two years left in his final term, will he follow suit and fund a similar program to the one China has planned? We can only hope!
Uh, no. Why does this have anything to do with Obama anyhow? Don't just buy millions of dollars worth of hardware and dump it in the hands of teachers. At least first create a small pilot program to see if this is a worthwhile idea before spending millions of dollars on a device that remains unused. Nothing good comes from wholesale adoption of technology without first checking to see if it will actually be of any use to students and teachers. See: California iPad program scandal / disaster.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's never to early to learn how to make counterfeit product
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
A Chinese elementary school already HAS industry-standard manufacturing equipment sitting right at the desks.
A lot of school districts in California either bought iPads or Chrome Books for every student. It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of weird priorities (and weird bureaucracy).
Now the school districts that got Chromebooks are upset because they got the cheap devices, and the ones that got iPads are upset because they keep breaking. It's like a disfunctional family.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Fantastic news. The Central Party has decided they will put these in all classrooms because THAT'S a proven model for improving student learning that has never worked anywhere ever. It's nice to know the idiotic thinking that leads to wide-spread system-level roll-outs of technology that isn't understood, supported, or used isn't monopolized in the United States.
We use terms like "budget running dry" or "the school districts simply can't afford them" to mask the fact that we have prioritized tax cuts over education. The US is a rich country but the money is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands by the process of rolling back progressive taxes (income and property). This is a conscious choice to ignore educational needs in the coming generations.
The availability of adequate budgets is a separate issue from the advisability of spending money on 3D printers. Spend the money on basic education first and if you still want to experiment with high tech, then fine.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
That's a myth. The U.S. spends more than a quarter of a million dollars per K-12 classroom every year (average 20-23.4 students per class). We could easily afford one 3D printer per school. Heck, we could afford one per classroom.
The problem is schools are top-heavy and administrators suck up most of that money, then create an artificial financial crisis every time a budget cut is threatened. This gets teachers and the teachers' union to claim we aren't spending enough on education, when we're already spending way more than we should be.
Yes I'm aware that first link I gave says administration is only $843 per student per year. That's because the administrators have gamed the stats to hide how much money they're sucking up. If you drill down into the numbers (p.56), you find that "In 2008-09, salary and employee benefits for school staff amounted to $8,797 per student." Subtract $843 for administration and that leaves $7954 per student supposedly going to instructional teachers.
For 2010, the average student to teacher ratio was 16.0 (this includes substitutes and assistants). Ask yourself, is the average teacher making ($7954 * 16) = $127,264 per year in salary and benefits? Of course not. The figure is inflated because the administrators have misclassified most of their salary and benefits as "instructional" instead of "administration" to hide how much money their draining from our educational system.
with budgets within many school districts running dry
Primary and secondary public education coffers have been moth riddled and bare for more than 30 years. most districs charge for class books, even if its only 5-10 dollars each. Sports facilities get facelifts only from local franchise fast food franchise moguls and the system routinely finds itself ardently justifying lunches that consist of pizza and french fries every day of the week. History class is a hodgepodge of bill nye reruns and just enough basics to get you through standardized testing, while biology and science classes casually cover balancing chemical equations and photosynthesis at a pace slow enough at which they can intentionally avoid the sociopolitical shit-storm of teaching evolution in an american school. Math, or what we refer to as math, is simple arithmetic by any international standard, avoids too much homework, and keeps it easy enough that the football team can pass.
comparing american and asian education systems is foolish. We once put an MTV owned project called Channel One TV, in nearly every school in the country with the promise of video learning but it eventually bore its true colours as a targeted advertising platform. When we're not packing hallways with vending machines and hustling kids into not-so-voluntary asvab military testing, we occasionally find time for asbestos abatement or the ever growing swath of parents that simply refuse to take part in their childs education from even the most cursory standpoint. So even if we did have 3d printers we wouldnt know how to use them, where to install them, or how to interface them with our 10 year Dell hand-me-down PC's.
Good people go to bed earlier.
But if it's like HP the ink costs more then the printer.
There is a lot more hype around the acquisition of 3D printers, than the actual utility of them. We have 'em in schools. I have friends that have 'em. We have one in our Hackerspace for free and open use. Except for a few novelty trinkets like game pieces, and iPhone case - in all the printers, in all the places - with all the people - this has been far from the world-changing devices they're often hyped to be. I don't want to say they're a "solution in-search of a problem" - but...let just say the "problems" are few and far between - at best.
Education is probably one of the areas that will benefit the most from 3D printers in the long run.
I don't see the reasoning for this conclusion, it seems to me this program is a colossal waste of money. I did a little searching and these benefits don't seem that great except in the cases of engineering classes. I am sure there are some students who will have their interest piqued, but there's a false assumption in that argument that the students would not have gone on to be engineers without that early exposure to some toy in the classroom.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Filament costs between $20-$40/kg, which will print out a lot of items. Most standard items are in the order of grams of filament.
I'm an absolute expert at photoshop and I know HTML design inside and outside. I'm a pro 3D landscape designer for my work and last time I tried a 3D modeling program, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. After hours I gave up, having barely made a peanut shape. If I can't do it, I don't think elementary children and their teachers can. They could simply download premade 3d models but that's not usually the point of doing it in schools.
Talk about vision! They are teaching their children to make things with 3d printers. AND they are converting their air into something that can be fed into the extruders instead of filament. Just plug it in and start printing.
It's going to be like everyone having a Star Trek replicator!
It doesn't follow that because you're an expert in 2D and some types of 3D design, you're automatically an expert in 3D modeling in general. Children trained early might actually become better than adults with years of computer graphics training. Maybe becoming a good 3D modeler requires the brain to be wired differently, something that can be easier to achieve in childhood, the way that a child for example can become fluent in a language faster than an adult would. Maybe it's the way a child is less afraid of making horrendous grammatical mistakes or ugly peanut-like shapes.
That is a racist comment?
Take the money out of union dues.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Who do you think will make these 3D printers ? Obviously not American companies.
I believe the point here is to promote mass production of 3D printers by offering a 400000 unit order to whoever can build these cheaply. If they manage to drop the price of entry-level 3D printers to say, sub-$100, there may be a huge market waiting for them. This, or the result of corruption by 3D printer manufacturers.
Why schools ? First : if they are to build 400000 3D printers, at least put there somewhere they can be used, second : kids working with 3D printers may become future customers, third : investing in education is good PR.
This type of tech - maybe not just in one wave, but things of this nature - should replace standardized testing. To hell with filling in little dots, let the kids actually *create* things and then they are more likely to succeed. Tons of nasty leech organizations grab the kind of money needed for these sorts of initiatives. Swat them away and get creative - and yes 3D printers are manufactured in the US.
--hongpong.com
With billions of Chinese that can't be regulated sans an iron fist (otherwise that takes too much effort to keep cracking the whip), it only makes sense to make them self-sufficent much in the same way farmers are today. Basically, stay in your own community, STFU, and make your own shit. That's the Chinese mantra inside the mainland.
Life is not for the lazy.
"Big government can't do anything right" crowd is constantly essentially handing our global competitors perpetual advantages, while increasingly sabotaging our economy.
It also amazes me that so many people don't seem to comprehend what a huge game-changer 3D printer tech is and the proliferation of inexpensive 3D printers.