The 8 Best 3D Printers for Kids

Voxel Labs created the Aries printer with newcomers and students in mind. It’s cheap, easy to use, and has a lot of features that make it the best 3D printer for kids all around.

From the way it looks, Aries is very different from most printers in its class. Kids are safer from the moving and hot parts of the machine because the printing area is only half open. The red details go well with the printer’s mechanical look and the machine looks great on any desk.

The Aries has a decent 200 x 200 x 200 mm build space. It keeps the machine’s overall size small but still gives enough space to 3D print toys and the like.

The printer also has a glass build plate and a simple three-point method for leveling. With these things, you have a good chance at smooth first layers and less chance of frustration.

One thing to note, though, is that the Aries makes a good amount of noise. The print head fans aren’t quiet at all, which can be annoying in a quiet classroom. Voxelab has also kept the printer’s source code secret. It keeps things streamlined, but it also makes it hard for curious kids to control and change how the machine works.

The Voxelab Aries succeeds spectacularly as a whole, though. For its sub-$300 price, the printer gets a lot of things right and is a great machine for someone just starting. It’s one of the best options for teaching STEM concepts in schools and for kids who want to learn more about 3D printing.

The Dremel Digilab line of 3D printers is full of top-quality products, and the 3D45 is one of the best. While it is priced quite a bit higher than most of the other options on our 3D printer for kids line-up, its excellent print quality and reliable performance make it more than deserving of its higher price.

The Dremel Digilab 3D45 is a great 3D printer for kids for many reasons. Firstly, its heated slide-in build plate allows for high-temperature filament printing, making it perfect for kids who want to experiment with more advanced filaments.

Additionally, its 9-point automatic bed-leveling system ensures that each print is produced with consistent quality, making it a great choice for budding engineers and designers.

Finally, its enclosed design and built-in carbon and particle filters make it one of the safest 3D printers available, perfect for kids who are new to the technology.

The Digilab 3D45 also comes with a 4.5” color touchscreen with an intuitive interface and a built-in camera for remote monitoring of 3D prints. Altogether, it is a reliable and long-lasting 3D printer that lets your child 3D print and experiment with filaments like ABS, Nylon, and PETG as safely as possible.

The Kingroon KP3S 3.0 is a compact printer that does a lot for its small size. It’s priced low, so it’s one of the best 3D printers for kids on a budget.

Its build area of 180 x 180 x 180 mm is not the largest print volume, but it’s not small either. You can still easily make a lot of 3D models.

The X and Y axes feature linear rails, which are rarely found at this price. It helps you improve the quality of the prints from this tiny machine.

Kingroon’s printer also has a Titan-style direct drive extruder and TMC2225 silent stepper drivers, both of which are uncommon in this price range. The direct drive makes it easier to print with flexible materials, and the TMC drivers drive the stepper motors quietly without whine.

However, there are certain aspects we would have liked to see better. For example, the external power supply unit and the tiny touchscreen. The PSU takes up extra room on the desktop, and even though the touch screen works, it looks and feels old and is in an odd place.

All things considered, there’s not much wrong with the KP3S 3.0 at $180. With a little tweaking, the printer can make high-quality prints. Kingroon’s customer service is also very good. It’s a great printer if you want to introduce your kids to 3D printing and are on a tight budget.

If you want to purchase a 3D printer kit for your child, Prusa 3D printers are some of the best you can buy. The Prusa Mini+ Kit is the perfect printer for young users and is essentially a smaller and more affordable version of their extremely popular i3 MK3S printer.

The Mini+ offers a 178mm x 178mm x 178mm heated build plate and Bowden extruder capable of printing most standard filament materials. It has a high-quality power supply for added safety, an optional Wi-fi add-on (it prints from an SD card otherwise), and an automatic bed leveling system with a SuperPINDA probe.

It also comes with removable flexible build plate sheets to help with layer adhesion and to make finished prints easily removable.

With its focus on ease of use and the fact that it can be purchased as a kit, the Prusa Mini+ is an excellent educational tool for your kid to get started with 3D printing.

The Adventurer 3 Lite is the lighter and smaller version of the Adventurer 3 series of printers. It’s small, well-made, and has an amazing list of features that check off a lot of boxes in the category of best 3D printer for kids.

Its body is made to be strong and has an industrial look. The printer has glass doors on all of its sides, and all of the printing happens inside those doors. This keeps kids safe and makes sure they don’t accidentally touch anything inside during printing.

The Adventurer 3 Lite was developed with connectivity in mind. You can connect the printer to your PC over Wi-Fi. You can send files to the 3D printer, keep an eye on your prints, and control it, all remotely.

There are a few things that we didn’t like about it, like the tiny build volume and the internal spool holder. The print space of 150 x 150 x 150 mm is much smaller than the other 3D printers for kids on this list. The built-in spool holder doesn’t fit standard 1 kg spools, so you have to buy smaller spools.

When put in the context of its intended audience—children—these issues seem small. Overall, the Adventurer 3 Lite is a great 3D printer that keeps your child safe while giving it everything it needs to print small but beautiful models.

For kids who like a hands-on artistic approach, a 3D pen may be a better option than a 3D printer. 3D pens work by extruding plastic filament through a handheld “pen” to create 3D art either freehand or by following stencils.

The 3Doodler Create+ is one of the best 3D pens on the market today. Manufactured by the well-known 3D printing pen company WobbleWorks, LLC., it is an upgraded version of their previous product, the popular 3Doodler Create.

The new model features a host of improvements over its predecessor, including a faster print speed and a more accurate temperature control system. It comes with a new power supply which allows it to work more efficiently and can heat up the plastic more quickly.

Due to how the 3Doodler Create+ and other 3D pens work, they are better suited to older children and teens and should not be given to younger kids. The nozzle reaches temperatures comparable to a regular 3D printer and the user has to keep their hand fairly close to the heat source while operating the pen, which is an obvious safety issue for young children.

It is also difficult to escape the fumes from the melting plastic, so even older users should use the 3Doodler Create+ in a well-ventilated area (especially when using a material that produces a lot of fumes like ABS).

The Elegoo Neptune 3 3D printer is the third model in the company’s Neptune line and has several upgrades over its predecessors. It has all the cutting-edge tech you’d expect from a 3D printer in 2023 and then some.

Elegoo has extended the Z-axis of the Neptune 3 to a whopping 280 mm for added height. With a 220 x 220 mm print bed, this print size is more than enough for printing your kids’ favorite dinosaurs, toys, and swords. Not at full scale, but larger than on the other 3D printer for kids options.

The print head of the Neptune 3 is equipped with a strain gauge auto-bed leveling sensor. This technology gets rid of the need for an external bed leveling sensor and measures 16 places on the print bed using the printer’s nozzle. It takes away some of the headaches of 3D printer calibration.

For its “silent features,” Elegoo used TMC2225 silent drivers on the XYZ axis and a TMC2209 silent driver on the print head. You or your kids won’t have to worry about the printer being too loud, which makes it a great choice for classrooms or study rooms.

This 3D printer has little wrong with it for the price. But if we had to choose something, Bluetooth or WiFi connections would have made the printer easier to use remotely.

The Neptune 3 is highly recommended as a kid-friendly 3D printer. Its low price, auto-leveling feature, metal extruder, and PEI bed sheet all give you a great deal for your money. When you add in the print quality, you have a quiet winner on your hands.

As the newer version of the popular Flashforge Finder 3D printer, the Flashforge Adventurer 3 is pre-assembled and is more or less ready to 3D print straight from the box. This makes it an excellent 3D printer for kids to get started with. Its proprietary Flashprint software is much more user-friendly than other slicing or print control software options, making it equally easy to set up models and send them to the 3D printer.

The Adventurer 3 is fully enclosed for great printing quality and safety. It also has a large touchscreen to start and pause printing, quickly load and unload filament, and more. Even young children can start making their own creations relatively quickly with this 3D printer.

It is important to note that the Flashforge Adventurer 3 has a smaller build volume than other popular printers. At roughly 150 x 150 x 150 mm, it can handle most print jobs but is not ideal for large or complex objects.

However, the Flashforge Adventurer 3 is a great choice for schools looking to start using 3D printing in their classes. The printer itself is well-built and the software is easy enough that students can operate it, making it an excellent classroom companion!