# School classes for 3D printing: cohorts, quotas, queues & rollover Group students into classes inside SimplyPrint's School plan. Each class is its own cohort with a teacher, an expiry date, per-student quotas, a class print queue, a bulletin board and optional auto-rollover into next year's class - so a 30-student lab is one organised roster, not a free-for-all. **Categories:** organization *One cohort per class - rosters, quotas and queues that match the timetable* ## School classes for shared 3D printers Stop running your 3D printing classroom out of a single shared login. The School plan gives you **classes** - the organising unit that turns 30 individual students into a roster you can quota, queue, message and roll over at the end of the year. Each class has its own teacher, its own expiry date, its own auto-chain to next year's group, and its own SSO mapping when you connect Unilogin or any SAML provider. ## What a class is - and why it matters A class in SimplyPrint is a small bundle of fields: a **name**, an **end date** (or a recurring MM-DD that re-arms every year), an optional **next class** to roll students into when the term ends, an optional **Google Classroom URL**, and an optional **SSO group ID** for IdP-driven membership. Layer that over the broader School plan and you get a real cohort: students appear in the right teacher's dashboard, share the right quota bucket, see the right bulletin board, and disappear at the end of the year without a manual cleanup pass. ## Why classes matter Classes give you three things flat-list rosters can't. **Accountability per cohort**: when a spool gets burned through in a week you know which class did it, not just "someone". **Budget per cohort**: quotas live at the class level so AP Engineering can have a bigger material allowance than the intro elective without you tracking it on a spreadsheet. **Audit per cohort**: the audit log filters by class, so end-of-term reporting, parent questions and insurance paperwork all answer themselves. ## A Classes column on the users page On a School account, the users page grows a **Classes** column right next to rank. Each row is a multi-select - assign a student to one class or several, change their classes in bulk, see at a glance who belongs to what. The same picker shows up in the **Invite user** modal, so new students land in the right cohort from the moment they accept.** Want to limit how many classes a single student can join? Settings → Organization → School settings → Max classes per user** caps it.** Classes are not Print Farm "groups".** Classes are time-bounded student cohorts (Year 9 Design, Period 3 Robotics) that expire at end-of-term and roll over to next year's intake. [Print Farm groups](/features/organisation-management/farm-enterprise) are persistent operational divisions (shift A, contractor pool, sales engineers) that don't expire. They can coexist on the same account - a school running a paid maker-services side hustle uses both. ## Quotas that follow the class On the School plan, **usage policies** let you cap monthly print time, filament weight or print count per user or per rank. Classes are the natural unit to group those quotas around - give your AP Engineering cohort a higher print budget than your intro elective, top a class up mid-semester when a project genuinely needs more headroom, and review balance-refund requests from the [teacher dashboard](/features/teacher-student-dashboard). Quotas are checked when a student queues a job, so nobody can sneak a 30-hour print past the system - they get a clear "out of quota" message and a one-click request-more flow that lands in the teacher's inbox. ## A class-scoped print queue with teacher approval Every print a student queues is tagged with their class membership, so teachers can filter the queue down to their cohort and approve, comment on or send back any job before it hits the printer. Combine class membership with [queue approval](/features/print-queue) and you get a proper teacher-gated production pipeline: students drop the file, the right teacher sees it, the job runs only when it's been signed off. Comments, revisions and approval history stay attached to the queue item, so end-of-term grading or audit conversations have a paper trail. ## Bulletin board, scoped per class The dashboard bulletin board doesn't have to be a single school-wide channel. Post a message scoped to one class ("Period 3 - the green PLA is on order, use the grey roll until Friday") and only that cohort sees it on their dashboard. Post a school-wide bulletin for things that genuinely concern everyone ("Lab closed for in-service training next Tuesday") and it shows on every dashboard. Rich text, multiple pinned messages, scheduled visibility - the same lightweight CMS that lives on the [teacher & student dashboard](/features/teacher-student-dashboard), just with a per-class audience selector. ## File tags that mirror your classes Create a tag per class and use **filename tag rules** to auto-apply that tag based on a regex pattern in the file name - so if your AP Engineering students prefix files with ap-eng_, every print they queue picks up the class tag without anyone touching the tag picker. Teachers can then filter the queue and file browser down to their cohort at a glance.** Pair file tags with the same file tag rules** to auto-route prints to specific printers or printer groups - so the design tech class's models always land on the lab's PLA-only machines and the AP physics class's prints go to the engineering wing. ## End-of-term rollover, without the spreadsheet **End-of-term used to mean re-tagging every student. Auto-rollover does it in one click.**** Two switches on every class take the pain out of end-of-year cleanup: - Delete students on end** - when the class expires, every student whose only membership was this class is removed from the account. No more 800 inactive logins from three graduated cohorts. - **Auto next class** - pick a successor class and SimplyPrint moves the roster forward automatically. Kindergarten becomes 1st grade on June 30th; Period 3 - Year 8 becomes Period 3 - Year 9 the moment summer break ends. Combine with SSO auto-import (any SAML provider plus Unilogin out of the box) and the end-of-term workflow goes from "two hours of CSV wrangling" to "nothing - it already happened". ## Class import from your identity provider If your school already runs a SAML SSO or Unilogin, classes don't have to be typed in by hand. SimplyPrint can pull the roster straight from the IdP and keep it in sync overnight - so the SimplyPrint class list mirrors the source-of-truth your school IT team already maintains. ### Manual import Pick IdP classes from the picker and import in bulk. ### Scheduled auto-import Flip a switch and the roster syncs itself overnight. ### Allow / ignore lists Filter which SSO class IDs are imported or suppressed. ### Auto-flag teachers List IdP groups whose members should land as teachers. ## Frequently asked questions ### How many classes can I create? Up to 300 classes per account. Most schools sit comfortably below that even at full district size - the limit exists to keep the picker fast and to flag rosters that have probably gone wrong (auto-import duplicating, for example). ### Can a student belong to more than one class? Yes. Class membership is many-to-many, so a student can sit in "Year 9 Design Tech" and "After-school Robotics Club" at the same time. The **Max classes per user** setting lets admins cap this if it gets out of hand - leave it blank for unlimited. ### What's the difference between a class and a user rank? A **rank** is a permission bundle (Admin, Teacher, Student, Read-only viewer) - it controls *what* the user can do. A **class** is a roster (Period 3 - Robotics, AP Engineering 2026) - it controls *who* the user is grouped with for quotas, queues, bulletins and file tags. A student has one rank but can belong to several classes. ### What happens to a class when its end date passes? If **Auto next class** is set, students roll forward to the successor class automatically. If **Delete students on end** is set, students whose only membership was this class are removed from the account. Otherwise the class simply expires - it stops gating new prints and the roster stays in place for end-of-term reporting until you delete it yourself. ### Does class membership change which printers a student can use? Not directly - printer access is controlled by ranks and permissions. But because class-tagged files can drive **file tag rules**, you can effectively route a class's prints to specific printers or printer groups (the design tech class always lands on the PLA-only machines, AP physics goes to the engineering wing). It's an indirect routing layer, not a hard access lock. ### Do I need SSO to use classes? No. Classes work on any School-plan sign-in flow - native SimplyPrint accounts, Google sign-in, or full SAML / Unilogin SSO. SSO just adds the option to *import* the class list automatically from your IdP instead of typing it in. ### Can I reorder classes in the picker? Yes. The classes list has a drag-and-drop reorder modal that persists the order across the whole account - so the teacher who looks at the picker eight times an hour sees their classes at the top, not buried alphabetically. ### Which plan includes school classes? Classes are exclusive to the **School** plan (marketed as **Education**). They're bundled with the wider classroom feature set - teacher / student dashboard, quotas, queue approval, SSO, Academy custom courses - at no extra cost. See the [pricing page](/pricing) for full School plan details. ## Classes are one piece of SimplyPrint for schools Classes are the organising unit; the rest of the School plan is the platform that runs on top of them - a [teacher & student dashboard](/features/teacher-student-dashboard), [school-shaped user management](/features/multiple-users/schools), the [Academy](/features/academy) with custom courses, SSO, queue approval and printer monitoring built for a lab full of mixed printers. See the full [SimplyPrint for schools](/schools) page to explore everything the School plan includes. --- **Learn more:** [Feature Page](https://simplyprint.io/features/school-classes)