Troy War with Sketchup in Junior High School [Final Version]

guzman tierno

You should be proud Guzman, that is quite a compilation you have there tying so many aspects into a single video.|

Thank you.

Here are some more details about this project.

The students got to work with SketchUp for one hour per week, over 18 weeks. Each week had its own theme:

Week 1: parallelpipeds and chairs (Rectangle and Push/Pull tools)
Week 2: simple houses to build a simple greek city (Line tool)
Week 3: tetrahedrons, octahedrons and variations
Week 4: tables with books, lamps, etc (groups)
Week 5: cube of cubes, pyramid of pyramids, etc. (moving and copying groups)
Week 6: wooden 3d puzzle (Divide tool)
Week 7-8: cars and roofs (multiple selection)
Week 9: icosahedron, dodecahedron, truncated icosahedron (rotating groups)
Week 10: pipes and vases (Follow Me tool)
Week 11: more round objects
Week 12: Temples
Week 13: DNA (Rotate tool)
Week 14: men, shields, swords
Week 15: rooms
Week 16: men, shields, swords - completed
Week 17: helmets (hidden geometry)
Week 18: Random stuff for the video: troy, war carts, etc.

For each week, students were given a worksheet explaining what they were about to model and how to go about it. For an example, check out the worksheet for the helmet (in Italian).

In all the students produced over 500 models during class, and completed another 100 on their own, at home. Here is their collection of models in the 3D Warehouse. Speaking of the 3D Warehouse, I didn't let his students download any warehouse models for this project; everything is from scratch!

You can see many more student videos of SketchUp projects (with 13-year old students) in my YouTube channel.

thanks,
guzman.

flipya

I can sympathize with Michalis on the whole Plato-Homer thing, and feel there's no real need to bring Greece's current financial position into the discussion.

That aside, I love your project man! It's great how you mix 'boring old' math with computers and 3d animation. I bet there's not a single student who didn't love doing this, and I'm sure by doing this you've taught your students a much better feeling for triple-axis systems. I was always pretty good at math, but some of my classmates weren't. They would've had great benefit from a project like this.

guzman tierno

@flipya said:

... I love your project man! It's great how you mix 'boring old' math with computers and 3d animation. I bet there's not a single student who didn't love doing this, and I'm sure by doing this you've taught your students a much better feeling for triple-axis systems. I was always pretty good at math, but some of my classmates weren't. They would've had great benefit from a project like this.

Thanks Philip,
you found better words than I was able to find to describe the meaning of this project.

I plan to describe better the whole project and to make the worksheets freely available but it's gonna take me some time and I need to translate them.

guzman.