I was hesitant to get my 11 year old daughter a 3D printer. Maybe I was selfish, but, like many parents, I spent the entire Christmas season dreading the phrase “meeting needed.” I didn’t know much about 3D printing other than reading stories about tabletop players and Starbucks about its various uses. I’m not looking forward to playing Warhammer or building a coffee shop, and since I play and assemble gadgets at work, I don’t enjoy doing them for fun.
But my 11-year-old daughter and her friends are learning 3D printing. They are constantly buying and trading 3D-printed characters. He got a 3D printing pen last summer and spent a few weeks playing with it. When he first asked for a 3D printer, he already knew all about Thingiverse and Printables and had ideas about what he would like to print with his machine.
If you’re a techie or do-it-yourselfer with 3D printing, you might be surprised to find that many parents aren’t convinced they want to get involved in the practice. It’s a common irony that a number of Reddit threads serve as forums for adults asking if elementary school kids can use a printer on their own. I’ve found answers there that are often unsatisfactory, as Redditors often jump to semi-technical advice (“Don’t get a resin printer, stick to PLA, PETG, and TPU!”) that doesn’t really answer the normie question.
Finally, I decided to satisfy my daughter’s wishes and see how difficult it would be to get her up and running on the new Elegoo Centauri Carbon 3D printer. I’m happy to report that the printer is almost as easy to set up and running as the Barbie Dream House. I found it so easy, in fact, that I agreed to test the Snapmaker U1, a more advanced four-color printer. Accordingly, I asked my colleague Divya Viswanathan, who was dealing with a similar printing situation from her toddler son, Leo Magnusson, to test a device designed specifically for children: the Toybox printer. The Toybox proved to be very limited in what it could print, but it was even easier than both the Centauri Carbon and the U1 to get to grips with, using an intuitive, kid-friendly app.
Based on our personal experiences, here’s what Divya and I can share with other parents who are a little hesitant to introduce their children to 3D printing.
How Much Space Does It Take?
Although I was surprised at how comfortable it was for my daughter to stand up and print (I’ll talk about this a bit later), I will admit that these devices are worth the space considerations. I’m sure many other parents evaluate their willingness to buy their child any gift at least in part by how much space it will require in the house.
The Centauri Carbon is certainly a large tool—about the size of a laundry basket—at about 20 inches long and 16 inches wide. And because 3D printers work by melting the filament (in this case, PLA, which is polyester), there is smoke. It won’t fill your house with the smell of melted plastic, but I still don’t want it working in my daughter’s room all the time.
I’ve had a Centauri Carbon sitting in an Ikea storage locker in the hallway of my library (I have a weird old house with rooms whose descriptions don’t map well to modern homes), and it doesn’t hurt anyone. The printer is as loud as my dishwasher, and I can hear the fan in the next room when it’s on. When printing, the tool head rotates on the rails in a herky-jerky manner; until I fastened the locker to the wall, everything moved.
