Best educational experience for my students, CNC or 3D printing?

I am a newly qualified secondary school teacher. I want to make a bid to our head for a prototyping machine for my students projects. I was attracted by 3d printers learning about them on my course but they are a bit outside our budget and I’m also worried about running costs...

I saw the Rapman at http://www.rap-man.com/rapman3d.htm
it is a lot cheaper than the dimension machines...
does anyone know if it works well, is it easy enough to build?
Is it cheap to run?

I also saw the Studiomill Educational CNC machine at http://www.corerobotics.co.uk/CR_Studiomill.html which looks a good CNC based solution though a lot more expensive than the Rapman, has anyone used it? With CNC I can use any material in the workshop but might CNC be more difficult to use?

Which will provide the best educational experience for my students CNC or 3D printing?

Cheers, Ian

Hi Ian,

I moved your post from our new members area to here as you are more likely to get an answer.

Welcome to the site...


Guys :feedback: for Ian

regards...

This thread was waiting to be moderated; I have now done that so you should get some replies.

I'd say 3D printing is much neater, because you're basically making something out of "nothing" - and that's more impressive.

With 3D CNC, you're taking something and removing bits from it to make it into something (also a bit wasteful). I'd certainly feel more of a wow factor from printing.

I would like to build a rep-rap machine (which the A1 machine looks like it's based on - http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome is the main site) at some point in time (which means I've not built one, so don't know the complexities of it).