A Prusa i3 is probably one of the safer printers out there. An enclosure would help keep it quiet in a classroom (and keep people from messing with it). You could always set up octoprint or similar with a camera so you could remotely shut it down if you needed to.
I got a matterhackers Pulse. And I have it tethered to an old small laptop/tablet an ASUS T100 I just turn teamviewer on and point the camera of the T100 at the printer. Then I can use my phone or other computer to have a look and if necessary hit the “cancel print” Button. An enclosure also helps a lot when you are printing filaments like ABS.
BTW we might print our whole next robot. Preliminary tests seem to be very promising. I mean the whole frame, gear boxes - everything.
So, a minor point of clarification about Octoprint / webcam and the school network. The network goes completely down with frequently enough that I definitely could not rely entirely on that. (Same reason I’m nervous about committing to Fusion 360 for our CAM software.) It’s a nice to have, but I can’t rely on it as “something really went horribly wrong / keep the school from burning down.” I feel like an either plexi or acrylic enclosure with a kitchen extinguisher would probably be sufficient, now that I’ve looked at the options. I’ll have to throw it together myself, it looks like, but that’s fine. I’ll probably throw some LED strips in the top just to be able to keep an eye on it via Octo when the school internet isn’t being total garbage. 