Personal 3D printers; the good, the bad, and the ugly

After a lot of literature review, consumer review research, and user board lurking, I've decided to table purchasing a personal 3D printer for now, to give the industry another year to clean up the bugs. Check out this very active thread on reddit that has a lot of thoughtful feedback about the scene. My goal was to get one to demo for my upcoming 3D printing class with UVa  SEP. But, given the short duration (5 weeks) and number of kids (36) and the mixed consumer reviews, I concluded having a small one to bring to the class risked being more of a distraction than teaching tool and at best, printing very small plastic completion medals, maybe 10 total given the amount of time it can take, wasn't the best lesson plan. So, changing tack, I've decided to change that portion of the 3D printing to focus on understanding "G code", the programming language that the printer interprets after you upload your stl file into a slicing program (Slic3r for example). I've created a lesson plan that will instead involve a 3D printing pen (yes, it has bugs too) so that after some hands on work creating 3D projects in Tinkercad, kids will create manual G code files using graph paper and rulers to spell out x, y, and z coordinates that the human "extruder "(kids holding the pen) follows to create a 3D shape. I always like to bring programming to life, so in a way, I'm glad to re-consider my lesson approach. And I hope it offers kids a deeper insight to the inner workings of the 3D printing frontier.