Ideas for SketchUp for Schools curriculum

[Tori_SU]

Hello Educators!

Hopefully most of you are familiar with the Curriculum tab in SketchUp for Schools, the place where we share our 3D modelling lessons with you and your students. If not, I’d encourage you to check it out on the Home Tab the next time you log in.

What you may not know is that many of our lessons have been developed with the help of educators like yourselves! Your feedback and suggestions are crucial to creating our content, because we want to make sure that it supports both what you teach and how your students learn.

Do you have a favourite existing lesson? Or maybe there’s one that hasn’t worked so well for your class? We want to know why.

Are there topics that you would like to see us cover in future lessons? Tools that your students could use more instruction in? Please let us know!

While we can’t guarantee that every request will make it into a published lesson, we do take them seriously, and your opinions will help inform our future content. So let us know what you’d like to see, and thank you for supporting and helping us continually improve our product!

[a.digiovanni]

I have given this suggestion before, and I think it is very worthy - but none of the folks who could literally make the changes that I mentioned has picked up the idea and run with it.

The tutorials are not given on that page in order of introduction > beginner > intermediate > advanced. They really should be, and with the recommended progressions within each level. I scratch my head over why this was not obvious, especially after these have been up for a while - and still get added to.

Another suggestion: Can there be more like these for the SketchUp Pro interface? The page with SketchUp courses - SketchUp Campus - should also be organized in a skill progression, not just a mumbo jumbo - but better yet, some tutorials at the same level as the intermediate and advanced SketchUp for Schools tutorials. I am teaching high schoolers, and except for a couple of those courses, the content really goes “Pro” - as in, assuming a ton of background. I’d love to see more in the middle here: time-efficient projects for grades 9-12 that use the full software.

I hope that makes sense.

[CaseyG]

Thanks for the feedback @a.digiovanni. We appreciate it and I can defenitely pass along your suggestions to the rest of the team.

I can offer some explanation as to why things seem to lack a logical order on the curriculum page but your idea to re-order things is good. Or it is in my opinion anyway. The reason they seem to be in a random order is because we initially only had one lesson for each level available and just added more as they became available. Navigation was not a big issue at first, but I can see that it is not an ideal experience at this point. I’ll pass this along to @Tori_SU and see what she has to say about getting things a bit more organized.

As for more high school level lessons, what would you like to see us cover? We try and come up with lessons on our own but we are usually just taking a guess at what you want to see. Knowing if there is a particular workflow or tool you would like us to cover would help us a lot as we design each batch of curriculum for SketchUp for Schools. If you don’t have a specific idea that is fine. Anything to get us pointed in the right direction would be great.

[a.digiovanni]

Hi Casey, it’s been a long time for this reply, but as we’ve just started a new school year and a few students have chosen to work with SketchUp (Pro) in my Computer Science and Programming course, I realized I needed to finally get back to you!

In Technology Exploration, with mostly 9th graders (a few 10th graders and even an 11th grader this year), I have a CAD unit every fall semester. The SketchUp for Schools curriculum: (SketchUp for Schools - Product | SketchUp | SketchUp) has lots to use. But it’s not organized - instead, it looks like Instagram. I’ve had to sort out my own logical list for Intro, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced tutorials.

To make the experience more high school-feeling - and to raise the bar for higher flyers - I do offer SketchUp Pro seats to anyone who wants to use it instead…and they can still generally follow the same tutorials. But what would be better is if there was a similar library of full-on, purposeful projects using SketchUp Pro on SketchUp Campus as there is for SketchUp for Schools.

The combination of “SketchUp Fundamentals” and “SketchUp Fundamentals - Modeling Practice” lessons guide students through the essential tools of SketchUp in a playground project. Let’s call this the high end version of the SketchUp for Schools “Pirate Ship Playhouse” tutorial.

But anything else on SketchUp Campus (“Landscape and Site Design,” “Commercial Interiors,” etc - is off the charts for high school students. The learning curve shoots so high with them, since it seems they were made for college level or those with years of experience in various CAD platforms. There is no equivalent for “SketchUp Logo,” “Your own Scale Figure” or the “Your Dream Home” tutorials at the Pro level, for grades 9-12.

These are exactly the types of themes I would like to he covering, though, with SketchUp Pro, at the high school level: prototyping, personalization, home design, business imagination, and civil engineering.

A colleague and I have discussed that our middle school technology course Computer Science Discoveries, which currently uses Tinkercad, could possibly begin introducing 7th & 8th graders to SketchUp for Schools - doing the Name Tag and Custom Castle projects, for example. This would give my course a naturally higher entry point - and greater room to use SketchUp Pro.

The problem is that the ground would fall out from underneath us pretty quickly, because there isn’t much to support us. We’d have to have them follow tutorials / playlists on YouTube. There are places to go for projects aside from SketchUp Campus, but they are produced for individuals who pay for learning on their own.

I would like to see more formal, guided tutorials on Campus - which are up to date with the current interface of SketchUp (Pro). And these should have a defined outcome, like SketchUp for Schools tutorials do (house, busienss, etc) while also allowing students to show their own spin of creativity.

I hope this is helpful feedback.

Andrew