Has any seen any good lessons or plans for students besides the basic few that Google Sketchup created themselves? I do this class at the junior high level and don’t have much guidance or curriculum. I do a decent job making up projects on my own but I am doing this with very little direction. I haven’t had much luck finding anything on teachers pay teachers or sites like that. YouTube has some good videos but is also limited or not current. I would like to find some more step-by-step, lessons or videos that would be good to use with my class.
I also do robotics and there are whole curriculums put out for that by Lego, as well as other companies. I am looking to find something like this, but for sketchup for schools. Please feel free to send anything my way if you want to share, I would gladly share what I do with other teachers as well. dobrien@nfsd.org
Feel free to look at SketchUp Campus as well. Nothing specific to Math lessons but you could use the Fundamentals to help get students up to speed and build on top of that.
Yes, those are some of the lessons we do. And a good example of what I would be looking for. Something like that. Step-by-step plans or a video.
We don’t use as much math as we should. I was given this elective and told to learn CAD with very little direction or instruction and I have just been learning on my own with no other teachers I know around to help. It is a semester class and kids have never done anything like it before, so we don’t get too advanced. Just make some simple things and 3D print a few things.
Open to anything that is school appropriate and you think 12/13-year-old kids, learning Sketchup for the first time would be able to create and possibly 3D print.
How do you think they’d do with modeling things to work with LEGO? The parts wouldn’t need to be complex and being smaller, would print reasonably fast.
There could be some interesting but simple math lessons involved. SketchUp can be useful for teaching math and geometry graphically, too.
I have a set of video lessons for an exercise in SketchUp for Schools from when I was teaching it. (I talked about the lesson in this post and the final results are in this post.) I’ve been meaning to edit them together and publish it, but at the moment it’s just an unpublished playlist on my YouTube channel. There are maybe a half dozen components provided to the students for the project that I’d have to give you as well.
Thanks for the feedback @goat20dev. We are always looking for new ideas for lessons and while it may take us a while to get something put together, we are always listening.
Is there anything in particular you would like to see us address in future lessons? As it stands, we try and guess what teachers and students might want. Hearing directly from a user is always a good thing for us. It lets us know what is successful as a lesson and what we need to improve.
Most teachers using SketchUp for schools are like me. No experience in CAD or Sketchup before starting the class, honestly I didn’t even know what it was. Literally, you could make anything, but what teachers would be looking for is start-to-finish, step-by-step instructions or YouTube videos that we can have kids follow. Most are like me, learning as we go, with no prior experience and our kids have even less experience. Sometimes we are learning it with the kids, as its new to us or we have no colleague or peer to go ask simple questions with when we get stuck on an issue. Many just get put in my class as an elective, they don’t choose it. But most like it they like tech, and view it as a sort of art on a computer. They love it when we print the 3D keychains they made.
I feel there would be some money to be made out there from someone who made a junior high, or high school, Google Sketchup curriculum that kids and teachers could follow. Something with enough material to keep kids busy for a semester. Not just 7-8 lessons like they have now.
I can buy tons of curriculum and lessons for Coding and Lego Robotics. So that’s why I was asking, I wish I could do the same for CAD. If someone or some teacher out there has material, I think there is a market for it as Tech, CAD and CTE will continue to grow in schools. Thanks to all for sharing what they have so far.
Certainly all of the principles of a high school (or middle school) geometry class can be modeled on SU for Schools.
The biggest roadblock for me to create a er set of lessons to complement my geometry curriculum is the lack of an angular dimensioning tool.
Geometry (in high school) is built upon the relationship of angles and distances . (Think triangle congruency for example)
My students can demonstrate and create figures to study midpoints, areas, reflections, etc. What I would like to do is have students create figures (triangles, transversals of lines, intersections of lines even) and then explore and highlight angles of equal dimensions.
I know that this would be a new feature in SU for Schools that is not available on other versions of SU (without installing extensions). But I need to ask it here as the ability to dimension angles in the 3D space of SU for Schools would be a game changer in terms of application and creation of high school curriculum that utilizes SU for Schools.
Thank you for writing this post, Goat and for reading this request, Casey. I would be happy to share /talk more with other math teachers or development folks at Trimble, if there is interest