Sketchup in Junior High School

guzman tierno

Hi,

remember me?

I'm am math teacher in Florence, Italy.
I teach in junior high school (11-14 years old kids) and I make my students use Sketchup as a work on solids.
Last year I posted some videos with my students' works

This year, my students worked hard,
one hour a week for 14 weeks so far,
and they produced really great stuff (and lots of models, 464 models so far).

You can see the models of my students here

I cannot make a single video with all this stuff so I'm making videos
with the models of each student or little groups.

Here goes the first one which I think is interesting.
Comments are really appreciated.

Models by Lorenzo 3D
[flash=640,385:1dq8srhk]http://www.youtube.com/v/kOjWUnEm9lE&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0[/flash:1dq8srhk]

models of my students here

by coincidence the name of the class is 3D

guzman.

Daniel

Thanks for sharing, Guzman. Some interesting designs, and an interesting little city they've created.

nomeradona

guzman.. SketchUp is part of the software that we use for our middle school students in math and information technology.
I also use it for my design students. High school. my grade 3 daughter use it too and she loves it.
thanks for sharing this.

guzman tierno

Here goes the composition of the models of another student: Dario.

Cars, icosahedrons, truncated icosahedrons, tetrahedrons, stellae octangulae, sierpinski tetrahedron, ...

Models by Dario 3D
[flash=640,385:2euu10ng]http://www.youtube.com/v/Gd6H3AAFBs0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0[/flash:2euu10ng]

models of my students here

guzman.

Gaieus

Hi Guzman,

Indeed they are great (and I can believe how much fun and joy your students find when working with SU!).

Now I would have a suggestion (or two):

make a "real" collection in the warehouse where you can introduce the whole project, add links etc.
also it would be cool if you could translate at least the collection page (and maybe some of the best model pages) into English so that those not speaking Italian, could also have a deeper insight.
Let me know if you need any help with this and generally with any advanced sharing and other features in the 3D Warehouse - I would be glad more than to help. It is very important to encourage these kids to fully exploit the potentials of SU in order to express themselves - and often the smallest "push" is very useful (but they also deserve it)

guzman tierno

Hi Gaieus,

many thanks for your comment and suggestions,

for what concerns collections, the models are actually organized in collections and you can check what they've done each week here.
the collection (or at least the main one) are lacking a whole description and links: you are right, I should put some work into that
about translations: yes, the description of the main collection (at least) should be in english, the problem is: some many things to do to follow each of my classes at school. I will put some effort into adding some more detailed descriptions for collections ...
I also have a very active Blog where I post about school, sketchup, math ... and the kids leave lots of comments ... but, again, it is in italian
Last year I wrote some notes about Sketchup and teaching math.

thanks,
guzman.

tfdesign

Hey Guzman, these are really fantastic! Well done to your class!

I'm going to be doing some very similar stuff to this (if we can get the funding), over the next few months, here in Birmingham, using SketchUp with kids from the local schools. So I'll also post back here when the work is done, and link up the results.

I must say, that what really struck me about the first video here, is how the different personalities of each child come out in each of the models. That's really nice. You've got some of the obvious castle type structures, but that simple star shaped 3D Asterisk really intrigued me too- a bit like a Frank Lloyd Wright future vision of the city ("The Living City"?).

Looking forward to seeing what comes next!

regards,

Tom

guzman tierno

Hi Tom,
thanks for your comment.

@tfdesign said:

I'm going to be doing some very similar stuff ... So I'll also post back here when the work is done, and link up the results.

That would be really interesting.

@tfdesign said:

... that simple star shaped 3D Asterisk really intrigued me too

The "Asterisk", as you call it, is sort of an exploded icosahedron
and it is simpler than it might look.
That is, you first draw an icosahedron:
you can find a simple explanation here,
you then pull each face ...

if you now connect the pulled faced you get a dodecahedron ...

if you instead truncate the vertices of the dodecahedron you get a soccer ball (truncated icosahedron) ...

guzman.

Gaieus

@guzman tierno said:

...about translations: yes, the description of the main collection (at least) should be in english...

I do not mean they should (only) be in English. But there is an option to translate the text and when someone with a browser set Italian as the default language (or from Italy by IP address) visits the site, it displays it in Italian and in English for the rest of the World.

(But I agree about the loads of work involved with this in general).

guzman tierno

@gaieus said:

I do not mean they should (only) be in English ...

Thanks you're right, I wasn't thinking about the way the 3D warehouse works ...
So, yes, the descriptions should be in various languages.

guzman.

guzman tierno

Here goes another one:

Model by Enrico
(music Nine Inch Nails)
[flash=640,385:1y83mr7y]http://www.youtube.com/v/OSPSQSM81Og&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0[/flash:1y83mr7y]

hope you find it interesting,

I think you can see that Lorenzo (the first one) is more technological,
Dario (the second one) is more life enthusiastic,
and this one is more childish and war-centric.

guzman.