Justin’s Place

SketchUp 3D modeling software will be great for visual spatial students. Ironically enough, exactly like the video, I have a project where my students create a floor plan of their dream home, and I see some of the exact same issues. Autistic students and even regular ed students struggle through the drawing portion of the project. Most students have a hard time “seeing” what a floor plan is; however, this software would be outstanding for helping them work through this difficulty. Software like this will definitely strike a cord with visually spatial students, but I think I’ll find that it will help all of my students when it comes to this project. There are a lot of possibilities for this in the classroom. As in instructor, I could use SketchUp to model math concepts that would otherwise be to large to bring into the classroom. For example, in the near future we will be examining indirect measurement. This is where you use proportions to typically solve for a missing height. For example you can measure your height, your shadow length, and the shadow length of a tree or building but need to calculate the it’s actual height. Sounds like a mess already? Yeah, that’s why my students and I will be using SketchUp to create models of our problem situations. This way we will be able to SEE exactly what is going on and what we are calculating!

[education] [application] [SketchUp]