Laser cutters in classroom - Complete guide
What are laser cutters in schools used for?
The use of a laser cutter & engraver machine in educational settings will significantly enhance your existing programs. A laser can offer hands-on training, which opens the door to many exciting careers fields, including engineering design and manufacturing. Drama students may bring ideas and imaginations to life using laser technology to fabricate new sets and props. And many more programs can directly benefit from laser cutting technology.
But in fact, laser cutting can help even in elementary classrooms or in subjects not directly connected to creation, manufacturing, or production. Laser cutting can help students with their overall satisfaction and precipitation rate, and they will be much more engaged with the subjects if they can try creating some cool things on a laser cutter. They can make a diagram engraved on wood, cut out a world map from acrylic glass and paint it over, or create a small keychain with their team's slogan on it.
Is laser cutting safe for children?
Laser cutters can be dangerous for kids (and even for adults) if they are low quality. Here are a few of the common safety issues with low-quality lasers.
- It can catch fire. This happens if the laser will cut through the material and still be actively focused on the same spot, which will cut through the laser's metal case, and then it may start burning.
- Toxic fumes. A laser cutter is used to cut various materials. Some of them, such as certain plastics, are harmless when solid but can be poisonous and unhealthy when heated by laser power.
- Hot or sharp surfaces. A laser becomes really hot while in action, and it also has many moving metal parts that can endanger children's hands if they can access the machine's interior while it's active.
Luckily there are a few home laser systems that were created for educational purposes. With kids in mind. one of them is MakeBlock laserBox that features a 40W CO2 laser, a rotary option (to engrave on cylinder-shaped items such as mugs). It has robust safety features in place, such as if you open the lid, the machine pauses the job, and it has an advanced Early Warning System in place to detect unsafe situations and make you aware. Other safe-for-kids devices are the Flux laser series and the Gweike cloud, a fantastic laser cutter for rock bottom pricing.
The FDA Laser class system explained
The FDA has developed a class system with levels 1 to 4 on how safe or unsafe a laser is. There are various different uses for laser technology starting with household items such as bar code readers, laser printers, DVD players, and laser pointers and it goes all the way up to lasers for eye surgeries and other medical uses.
| Class FDA | Class IEC | Laser Product Hazard | Product Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 1, 1M | Considered non-hazardous. Hazard increases if viewed with optical aids, including magnifiers, binoculars, or telescopes. |
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| IIa, II | 2, 2M | Hazard increases when viewed directly for long periods of time. Hazard increases if viewed with optical aids. |
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| IIIa | 3R | Depending on power and beam area, can be momentarily hazardous when directly viewed or when staring directly at the beam with an unaided eye. Risk of injury increases when viewed with optical aids. |
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| IIIb | 3B | Immediate skin hazard from direct beam and immediate eye hazard when viewed directly. |
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| IV | 4 | Immediate skin hazard and eye hazard from exposure to either the direct or reflected beam; may also present a fire hazard. |
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Are laser cutters bad for the environment?
In short, the answer is not at all! Not just it isn't bad, but according to some, it is even helpful to reduce pollution and helps make the world green again. And here is why
- Production is on a small scale and locally; therefore, no shipping is required (at least not international shipping), which is a tremendous benefit considering that the main source of greenhouse gas is transportation.
- Less waste than traditional marking, stamping, and cutting. It doesn't leave waste, and it rather makes the material resolve in the air. Additionally, the machine itself does not require a lot of replacement, and one laser tube can handle 15 years of cutting as opposed to blade cutting that has to be replaced often.
- Energy reduction is a great way to keep our planet green, and when you use a laser cutter, you will use less energy per project. It also can help you sometimes complete your whole project with the same machine, such as cutting, marking, and engraving, so less machinery is used, which means less energy to power up those machinery.
How much does a laser engraver cost?
After reading about all the benefits laser cutters can bring to schools and to humanity in general you probably wonder what the price tag for a high-quality cutter is about, the truth is that there are pricing all over the place, and even if we will narrow down our search for just desktop kid-friendly cutters you will still have pricing between two thousand dollars Beamo and the ten thousand dollars FSL Muse.
But if you want the best value for the money spent we will give you an option of two great home laser cutters the first one is the Flux Beamo which has a price tag of around 2K and is a super solid 30W engraving machine with a well-designed software, the second one is the Gweike Cloud which features a cutting power of 50W and some super cool features such as passthrough slot, autofocus, and free air filter, the price tag is about three thousand which is still affordable according to different brand cutters.
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