SketchUp Walk Through Videos in ICT and English

Each year our students work on a piece of writing in English lessons in which they describe a character's mind as a room. Once they are done the recreate these rooms in SketchUp as models, creating some of the components as well, and record a walk through video. This year they worked on rooms for the characters from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as well as S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.  

The following playlist contains walk through videos from the last 3 years, starting with those which were done in 2013. We hope you  enjoy them.

Using Minecraft

We have recently purchased licenses for Minecraft Edu and are about to set up our first server. This is a huge step for us as the 7th grades will be using Minecraft in ICT to plan and build fortresses in teams. We have a great many team leaders in the 7th grade who will be in charge of organising each build, leading the work and building the more complex structures and mechanisms. This is our first time trialing Minecraft at school. That said, a good half of the grade has rated their abilities as intermediate to expert. The remaining half are novices who will be learning on the job, with the support of their teacher, their team and our online lessons.

Students will use their understanding of Castles and Fortresses from their 6th grade work to organise the materials, and plans for the project. We will build in Creative mode most of the time, but test the structures in survival mode during the process and once the builds are complete. 

It is always heartwarming to see students selecting the right tool applying their ICT skills in other subjects. Our 8th grade students have been working on WW1 Trench projects in Humanities and two of them have recreated their interpretations using two very powerful digital tools, Minecraft and Sketchup.

I have included their work below.

SketchUp Trenches




Minecraft Trenches 

Augmented Reality and SketchUp

I am in SketchUp mode right now, as we are working with the program in our 8th grade lessons. The students have been given a special task. They are to create a room based on a descriptive piece they wrote in English lessons, entitled a Character's Mind as a  Room.

It's the second time we have done this project in two years the culminating activity for which,  is to create a SketchUp video of the models. Yesterday the plans changed a bit something new and exciting appeared on the horizon. I came across a slide share presentation posted by Martin Burrett on augmented reality. The presentation lead me to AR-Media's cool plugin for Google SketchUp. I needed to check this out, one because I have never really investigated augmented reality (except for the time I tried to get it to work in Zooburst, failed and gave up...[Note to self: go back and try this again]), but more importantly because it would be an exciting activity to do with our kids when they complete the unit. They could even screencast themselves manipulating their models.

All anyone needs to do is to download the free plugin from AR-Media then build or open an existing  model. A working webcam is a must, most computers come with built in cameras today, as is a print  off the marker from the AR-media folder in your computer library.

To get a better idea, watch the very short inexpert video demonstration I put together. There are plenty more of these peruse, including one produced by In Globe Technologies, which demonstrates layers management, real time sections and more.