Tuesday, September 16, 2008

SketchUp Houses Fly-over

I have a new class this year which is a kind of buffet style course encompassing all my other courses: programming, robotics, and digital video. They just finished a three-day project building houses in Google SketchUp and then "visiting" each other in Google Earth.

I love the way these simple and intuitive tools allow kids to make immersive experiences really quickly. It's a real hook, and there's a lasting "pay-off" value when kids can build their own models and share them - kids come back and build stuff during open lab times just for fun.