Sketchup Blog - News and Notes from the Sketchup folks

SketchUp in a high school history class

Pick a high school - any high school - and in the history class you might find some of the students doodling, yawning and pretending to stay awake. Replace that scene with an enthusiastic teacher and a healthy dose of SketchUp and you might see every student engaged! After all, it’s not every day a high school student can model a local building and upload to Google Earth for the world to see. In some cases, they might get so engaged they chomp at the bit to get access to tutorial videos while on road trips.

Does this sound far fetched? Not to Hartford High School teacher, Michael Hathorn, who introduced his class to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth and started teaching them about local history while they used SketchUp to model their home town of Hartford, Vermont. The class caught on quickly and now have over 75 models in their Hartford History Project collection in the Google 3D Warehouse. Over 50 buildings have been accepted into Google Earth.



The benefits of students being engaged in their own learning has not been lost on Michael. He told us, “Some teachers may say the book history is more important but I feel like the end result is these guys are teaching, verses learning and that’s when you really become a student - when you make that transition to teaching. I think learning SketchUp is really important for a history class like this.”

Technology has been a key part of the class, and the idea that the students would share their local history with the world. They created a website and blog to accompany and showcase the 3D models. With each model created, a history of the building is researched and added to the growing website dedicated to their town. It’s definitely worth a look.

We were so intrigued by the efforts of these students that we highlighted them in a new video:



Permalink | Links to this post |
The comments you read here belong only to the person who posted them. We do, however, reserve the right to remove off-topic comments.

5 comments :

John said...

I hope the excellent Hartford video inspires other colleges to follow suit. New SketchUp users will find it fascinating to recreate buildings in virtual form and to realise that these buildings reflect the decade or era in which they were constructed. The history panel metadata will teach students about the origin and subsequent evolution of each building.

Unknown said...

Fantastic to hear about educators who use creative methods to inspire and educate students.

Guzman said...

Pick a junior high school - any junior high school - and in the math class you
might find some of the students doodling, yawning and pretending to stay
awake. Replace that scene with an enthusiastic teacher and a healthy
dose of Sketchup and you might
see every student engaged! After all, it’s not every day a junior high school
student can model cars, builidings, icosahedrons, ... and upload them to the 3D warehouse for the world to see. In many cases they get engaged and they send the teacher lots of models they made at home.

Does
this sound far fetched? Not to "Poliziano" Junior High School teacher, Guzman Tierno, who introduced his class to the Sketchup and the 3D-Warehouse and started
teaching them about math while they used SketchUp to model cars, builidings, icosahedrons, ... using parallelpipeds, cylinders, etc. The class caught on quickly and now have over 600 models in
their "Poliziano Junior School" collections in the Google 3D Warehouse.

Technology has been a key part of the class, and the idea that the
students would share their models with the world. The teacher made a blog
to accompany and showcase the 3D models. With each model created, the comprehension of math increased. It’s definitely worth a look.

The teacher was so happy with the results that he created many videos with the students' and in particular the follwoing one dedicated to Troy War. Really worth watching.

Thanks.

(guzman)

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Term Papers said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.