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School and makerspace workflows: from teacher-led to student-led printing

A classroom or makerspace is not a print farm, and it is not a hobbyist's desk either. The hard part is rarely the printers - it is the people. You have students with very different skill levels, a teacher or lab manager who cannot stand over every machine, a shared room, and a real need to know who printed what. SimplyPrint is built to handle exactly that, and the nice thing is you get to choose how much freedom each student has. You can run everything yourself on day one, then hand over more control as students prove they are ready.

This article is about the workflow, not the click-by-click. It walks through how to set your account up, the spectrum of student freedom you can land on, and the tools - queue approval, queue groups, quotas, the Academy, the Hub and access restrictions - that let you run the room the way you want. Each section deep-links to the full how-to.

Several tools in this article are part of the School and Enterprise plans: queue approval, quotas and limits, user balance, and the panel-side access restrictions. User groups and the Hub are available from Print Farm up, and inherited by School and Enterprise. Where a tool is plan-gated, it is called out in its section.

User group edit modal showing the Students group with a permissions matrix and SAML mapping

Start with user groups and permissions

Before you think about who can print what, set up your user groups. A user group is a named role (Students, Teachers, Lab assistants, Admins) that carries a bundle of permissions and, on School and Enterprise, the quota policies that go with it. Getting the groups right first means every student you add later just inherits the right level of access.

SimplyPrint has a large, granular set of permissions, organised by area: printing, the print queue, the slicer, courses, the filament system, users, organisation management and maintenance. You do not have to understand all of them. The defaults are sensible, and you mostly care about a handful of toggles per group - whether a student can start a print, whether they can submit to the queue, whether they can manage other users, and so on.

One split is worth knowing about because it unlocks a clean classroom setup. "See the Printers page" and "start prints from the panel" are two separate permissions. You can leave the Printers page visible so students can watch a print and check cameras, but turn off panel printing so they cannot kick off a job directly - which funnels their printing through the queue or the Hub instead, under your supervision. There is also a queue-specific print permission, so a student can print through the queue even without general panel-print rights.

Set up groups first, then organise the same students into school classes (like 1.C or Y9 Design). Groups carry permissions and quotas; classes handle the cohort side, with optional automatic year-to-year roll-over so you are not rebuilding rosters every September.

For the full breakdown of what each permission controls, see User groups and permissions: what each one controls and School classes: organise your students into cohorts. If you are brand new to a school account, Onboarding your school is the step-by-step companion: teachers first, then students, then classes and rules.

The spectrum of student freedom

Here is the core idea. SimplyPrint does not lock you into one "school mode". Instead you pick a point on a spectrum, from fully teacher-led to fully student-led, and you can set a different point for different classes or groups. The tools below are what move you along it.

Tier 1: the teacher prints everything

The lab manager or teacher does all the actual printing. Students do not start machines at all. What changes versus the old way is how the file gets to you. Instead of a pile of emailed STL files and "did you get my attachment?" messages, the student uploads their file straight into the print queue. You see it appear, you pick a printer and start it. No attachments to chase, no version confusion - the file is right there in the queue with the student's name on it.

This is the safest starting point for a younger class or a brand-new lab. The student dashboard makes it natural: students get a simple landing page where they upload a file and watch their own queue, and you keep the start button. See The teacher, student and admin dashboards.

Tier 2: students submit, you approve each job

The middle ground is queue approval. Students submit prints to the queue themselves, but nothing runs until a teacher reviews it. You approve it, deny it, or send it back with a comment - a clogged-looking model, a 14-hour monster, a part that is clearly off-task. Approval is a manual decision (or a rank exemption so trusted staff bypass it); there is no auto-approve-by-cost and approvals do not silently expire. It is a real human gate on every print, which is exactly what you want once students are submitting on their own but you still need the final say.

School print queue with a Pending approvals section and printer-group tabs

Queue approval is on the School and Enterprise plans. The Print Farm plan includes the print queue itself but not the approval review step.

Queue approval settings page with the enable toggle

You can also approve pending prints from your phone, which is handy when you are walking the room rather than sitting at a desk. The deep-dive is Queue approval: review and approve prints before they run.

Tier 3: students start their own prints, within quotas

The most independent setup lets students start their own prints. You keep control not by reviewing each job but by capping how much they can print. Quotas and limits let you set ceilings per user group (and per class): a number of prints, grams of material, print time, or cost over a period such as a week, a semester or a fixed date range. A student who hits their cap simply cannot start another print until it resets or you top them up. This is great for a self-serve makerspace or an older, trained class where stopping to approve every job would just be friction.

Student quota and balance page showing a print quota and material quota in grams

Alongside quotas there is user balance - prepaid printing credit per student, so a print can draw down a balance you have given them (enforced, or just tracked). Quotas cap how much each student can print in a period; user balance is a credit system you can layer on top when you want students spending against a balance rather than a recurring allowance. Use either, or both. See The quotas and limits feature and The user balance feature.

The point of the spectrum is that you are not stuck. Many labs start every class at Tier 1, move a class to Tier 2 once students know the ropes, and graduate a senior group to Tier 3. You can run all three at once across different groups.

Track work on machines SimplyPrint does not run

Most labs have more than 3D printers. There is often a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, a CNC, or a finishing step like sanding and painting that someone has to do by hand. SimplyPrint cannot drive those machines, but you can still keep them on the same board with a virtual queue group.

Turn on the virtual queue option when you create a group and that group never sends a file to a printer. Items sit in it as a tracking lane, and you mark each one done by hand (+1 finished, or Mark finished) while it keeps its queue position, deadline and tracking. Use it for work SimplyPrint does not run itself - outsourced parts, a manual finishing step, or a machine it does not control, which could be a non-3D-printer like a laser cutter. The laser cutter is just an example of "a machine SimplyPrint doesn't control"; it is not a supported device type or an integration, and SimplyPrint does not connect to or operate it. The value is that the whole job - print the bracket, then laser-engrave the panel, then paint it - lives in one place with one set of deadlines.

Create-group modal with a virtual-group option and a user-group restriction

For the full mechanics, see Queue groups: organize your print queue by printer or purpose.

Train before they print: the Academy

The Academy is built-in training that lives inside your account - no separate platform. You build courses out of slides, quizzes and embeds, then assign them with optional due dates and a require-before-printing block, plus sign-off. There are attendance sessions too, where students self sign-in or you mark them present against a roster.

Academy admin overview with course-category cards

The standout for schools is the blocking assignment. You can require a safety or printer-induction course before a student is allowed to print, and access unlocks automatically the moment they finish it. No more chasing who has and has not done the induction - the system simply will not let an untrained student print until the box is ticked.

Reports, assignments and attendance are part of the School and Enterprise plans, and the teacher and student dashboards are School. Start with the Academy overview, then Course assignments: require courses for your students or team and Attendance tracking in the Academy.

A shared screen in the room: the Hub

A classroom usually has shared printers and a shared computer or two, not one device per student. The Hub is the answer: a stripped-down, single-page printer view you put on a screen in the room. With temporary login, a student walks up, signs in, does what they need - start a print, check a job - and gets automatically signed out a moment later. Every action is tied to that real person, so your queue and history stay accurate even though everyone shares the same screen.

Pair the Hub with the permission split from earlier. Leave the Printers page visible but turn off panel printing for students, and the Hub becomes the controlled walk-up point where printing actually happens, under each student's own name. The Hub is available on Print Farm, School and Enterprise. See The Hub: a shared printer screen for makerspaces, schools and farms.

Print only from the lab: access restrictions

A common rule is "students can only print when they are physically in the lab". You build that from two pieces: allowed IPs (only your lab's network can print) and approved devices. You can combine them with ANY (this network or this device) or ALL (this network and this device), set how hard the block is, and exempt owners or senior staff.

Be honest about the limits before you rely on this. A whole campus often shares one public IP, so you cannot isolate a single lab by IP alone, and a VPN will break IP matching. "Approve this device" is bound to a specific browser plus the operating-system login it was approved under - it is not tied to the physical PC. So a shared lab computer where each student logs into the OS with their own account reads as an unapproved device for everyone but the one who approved it. The clean fix for a shared lab PC is one always-signed-in kiosk login that owns the approval, with the Hub providing per-student identity on top.

The panel-side IP allow-list (restricting panel access to allowed IP addresses) is part of the School and Enterprise plans; Hub-level restrictions are available from Print Farm up. Enforcing 2FA for every member is an Enterprise-only control. For the practical setup, read How to restrict printing to your lab, library or makerspace (kiosk setup), and for the technical detail your IT team will want, Approved devices and IP restrictions, explained. There is also a panel-focused version in Require 2FA and restrict panel access by IP.

Picking your starting point

You do not need every tool on day one. A simple, effective first setup looks like this: create a Students group with panel printing turned off, have students upload files to the queue, and start prints yourself (Tier 1). That alone replaces the email-me-your-STL routine and gives you a clean record of who submitted what.

From there you grow. Add queue approval when you want students submitting on their own but still want the final say (Tier 2). Add quotas and let trained, senior students start their own prints (Tier 3). Layer in the Academy to gate printing behind a safety course, put a Hub screen in the room, and add access restrictions if you need printing locked to the lab. Each step is independent and reversible, and you can run different tiers for different classes at the same time.

The qualitative win for teachers is real even at the simplest setup: students drop their file straight into the queue instead of emailing STLs around, so you are not juggling attachments or wondering which version is the latest. The setup grows with your confidence in the class, not the other way around.

If you are planning a rollout across a district or a large lab and want a hand mapping groups, classes and approval rules to how your room actually runs, contact your SimplyPrint education contact or email contact@simplyprint.io for School and Enterprise onboarding.

Updated on: 25/06/2026

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