Now THIS is a class project

Yesterday I heard from Guzman Tierno, about whom I last posted about a year ago, with his 24-vehicle pile up model. Guzman is a middle-school math teacher in Italy, and if I had my childhood to do over again, I'd move to Italy and join his class.

Below is the culmination of his year-long class project: The Trojan War. Keep in mind that these models (except for the islands) were made by a class of eighteen kids who are ONLY THIRTEEN.



This video's got it all: geometric objects, houses, war machinery, battle scenes (complete with non-gory decapitations), even a Trojan Horse you can peek inside. In a single project kids are learning math, history, geography, and architecture. Plus I imagine the kids had a blast doing this.

Guzman's students got to work with SketchUp for one hour per week, over 18 weeks. Each week had its own theme:

Week 1: parallelpipeds and chairs (Rectangle and Push/Pull tools)
Week 2: simple houses to build a simple greek city (Line tool)
Week 3: tetrahedrons, octahedrons and variations
Week 4: tables with books, lamps, etc (groups)
Week 5: cube of cubes, pyramid of pyramids, etc. (moving and copying groups)
Week 6: wooden 3d puzzle (Divide tool)
Week 7-8: cars and roofs (multiple selection)
Week 9: icosahedron, dodecahedron, truncated icosahedron (rotating groups)
Week 10: pipes and vases (Follow Me tool)
Week 11: more round objects
Week 12: Temples
Week 13: DNA (Rotate tool)
Week 14: men, shields, swords
Week 15: rooms
Week 16: men, shields, swords - completed
Week 17: helmets (hidden geometry)
Week 18: Random stuff for the video: troy, war carts, etc.

For each week, students were given a worksheet explaining what they were about to model and how to go about it. For an example, check out the worksheet for the helmet (in Italian).

The final project - putting it all together, took another six weeks. The moving parts (cart wheels, soldiers fighting, etc.) was done in Sketchy Physics - that bit was done by Guzman himself. In all the students produced over 500 models during class, and completed another 100 on their own, at home. Here is their collection of models in the 3D Warehouse. (Speaking of the 3D Warehouse, Guzman didn't let his students download any warehouse models for this project; everything is from scratch!)

Guzman has a YouTube channel where you can see many more student videos of SketchUp projects. When you're watching, keep in mind - THIRTEEN year-olds! What were you doing at 13?



Anyone can design anything in 3D! http://www.3dvinci.net/

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