UltiMaker announced a new educational program, MakerBot Nebula.
The company has long been involved in the educational sector, providing machines, materials, and educational programs for classrooms and instructors. The MakerBot Nebula program is a new program that provides advanced features for educators.
The key to MakerBot Nebula is AI technology, which is used to interact with an educator to design new experiences for specific classroom situations. The AI Experience Builder asks a series of questions about the situation, such as grade level, objectives, alignment to standards, etc., and then automatically generates a curriculum and rubric for the educator.
This is not a canned program as is often seen with other 3D printer manufacturers addressing the education market. Instead, we have a custom-generated experience that fits classroom situations.
There’s also the Learning Station, explained by UltiMaker:
“This guided professional learning hub helps educators develop essential teaching skills, starting with 3D printing. Teachers learn how to set up and operate UltiMaker and MakerBot 3D printers, apply classroom best practices, and explore design thinking—all with AI-guided support along the way. Courses will continue to expand beyond 3D printing to cover classroom technology, digital design, and more. In the beta version, printer-specific advanced troubleshooting and course certificates will not be available.”
Evidently, UltiMaker has collected quite a pile of data about 3D printing and trained a new AI model to make use of it.
Finally, MakerBot Nebula includes something called “Funding Assistant”. I was initially puzzled why an administrative function would be mentioned in a technical tool. However, I understood what’s going on as I read the explanation of “Funding Assistant”.
Funding Assistant is an AI-powered chatbot that helps educators identify and apply for educational grants. The tool asks a series of questions and narrows down a list of applicable grants for the specific situation. It also is able to draft applications, which should save educators a huge amount of time.
There is a catch, however. The initial version of Funding Assistant will only work with their own MakerBot Grants program. That program provides a printer, filament, a guidebook, certifications, and a service plan to those accepted. This program is available to educators in the US and Canada.
It’s clear, however, that UltiMaker intends on extending the grants to a far wider range of possibilities. That will take some effort to collect and organize — but that work is what individual educators would face on their own. Here, UltiMaker is doing the work once for everyone.
If you’re an educator, you might want to check out MakerBot Nebula.
Via MakerBot Nebula
