Geofix: Awesome Geometry Toy

This is a little delayed, but I visited the Didax booth last week at NCTM, and found some cool toys. What I took home was a small set of Geofix tiles - a set of interlocking polygons of equal edge length, which can connect to form Platonic and Archimedean solids, as well as stuff like mushrooms and snails:



As soon as I got home and showed these to my kids, they sat on the floor playing with them (and fighting over them) for a long while. My 9-year old made the snail.


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Math Teachers Dig 3DVinci

I'm in beautiful Boston, MA today and tomorrow, for the regional meeting of NCTM. This morning, Jon Choate and I gave a talk on 3D geometry with Google SketchUp. We had one of the larger conference rooms (about 300 capacity), and it was standing room only. At some point they stopped letting people in.



At the booth afterward, people said our talk was the highlight of their day, and that many people spent time at other presentations in the back, downloading and playing with SketchUp.

For the models used in our talk, see our 3D Warehouse collection.

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Escher for Halloween

I got this model from a teacher named June Still-Flores, who created these triangular Escher tiles after working through one of our September Projects of the Month.


Here's part of what June wrote:

I want to thank you for all the information you have about Sketch up. We are a small school (www.parkviewchristian.net) and we have started a high school this year. Its very non-traditional...we have 2 full time freshmen that come all day monday thru friday, and we have 12 more homeschool kids that come in various times for various classes. This year I have become a teacher for the "electives" for our freshmen. I am using SketchUp for our graphic arts class. I have never used SketchUp till I started this class. Your projects are a Godsend for our class. I started to search for more information about SketchUp lesson plans and I am soooo glad I came upon your site. It has been informative and useful. I have subscribed to the projects of the month club, which we are using for our class projects. I have been working on the Escher Triangle project. It has taken me about 3 hours and lots of "undoing" but feel a sense of accomplishment now that I have done it.

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October Projects are Ready to "Ship"!

On October 15th, subscribers to our Projects of the Month will be getting their second batch of projects. (The September projects were described here.)

If you haven't signed up yet, here's some incentive to do it soon: the $24 per year price will go up to $36 next month!

Here's what's on tap for October:

Hexagon Mosaics

You'll learn how to tessellate a hexagon, and use simple tools to embellish the pattern. This project also makes use of components, for easy, all-at-once updates.



Changing Textures

You've probably painted faces using materials like brick, stone, and tile. This project will show ou how to change a material's size, color, and exact placement.




Placing and Sizing in Google Earth

See how to place a SketchUp model in Google Earth, how to adjust the model's size and location, and how to make copies of the model.



Feedback on the September projects was incredibly positive; I'm excited to see how these projects are received as well! Again, here's the link to sign up.



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New Math Forum Project: Escher!

SketchUp + Escher = Skescher?

Here's my October project for the Math Forum: creating Escher tiles based on a square. This project appeals to math students, but also kids in art or graphic design classes. I let my own kids loose with this project, and they had a blast (though the model below was made by yours truly).


Escher was a genius - not only does his work teach concepts like tessellation, but also requires that you use your imagination to come up with animals or strange-looking people or monsters. What kid (or adult) wouldn't find that fun? And what better application to create these tiles than SketchUp?



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Modifying a Push/Pull

In addition to writing about useful plugins (see here, here, and here), I also like to write about features within SketchUp itself that most people don't know about. The subject of this post is the ever-popular Push/Pull tool, which you can modify with the Ctrl key (PC) or Option key (Mac).

Say you start with 3 concentric, flat circles:


This is what you get when you use Push/Pull on the red circle:

But this is how the underside looks - the original circle has been "sucked" up to the top of the red cylinder. What if you want to keep that face there?

The pulled faces always disappear when they are within other faces. If you pulled up the yellow and green circles, only the outer (green) circle would remain on the bottom.

Here's how you can preserve the pulled face. Starting over with the flat circles, activate Push/Pull then press (don't hold) Ctrl/Option. You'll see a "plus" sign on your cursor. Pull up as normal; from this view the result looks the same as before.

But on the underside, you still have the face at the center of the circles. It's been switched from front to back (the color is the "back" color), and I have no idea why this happens, but at least the face is still there.

If you then use Ctrl/Option for the yellow and green faces (you have to press the key anew each time), you'll keep all three faces at the bottom.

Here's a more practical application: cutting a window. The flat orange face below is to be pulled forward, to create the window moulding.


With or without the Ctrl/Option key, the window will look fine from inside the room.

But here's how it looks from the outside, without the modification - the moudling face was sucked back into the room.

With the Ctrl/Option key, you keep the face (albeit reversed) within the wall.





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Teen Center, Designed by Tweens

Mike Valler works with the Boys & Girls Club of Greater New Bedford, and has been showing his kids how to use SketchUp. Here is the design the kids came up with to fill the space in their new teen center. All of the furniture was designed from scratch, so just imagine what they'll put in those rooms once they start using the 3D Warehouse.

The designers of this project are between 10 and 12 years old. Pretty impressive.

Click the 3D button on the model below, and then drag the mouse from left to right to spin it around. Zoom in and out with your scroll wheel.


Mike says:

The only training they had was help by asking me as we went. It was very much a trial and error on all of our parts... but great fun. And for them to help create what is now the teen center was really cool for them.

If you want to download this model, get it here in the 3D Warehouse.


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What a Great Way to Start off the Week

Willy Felton is a teacher who is using my ModelMetricks and GeomeTricks materials with his students. I blogged about him before - see One Teacher's Opinion.) He sent me a link to this YouTube video he made showing what his students have done:



There's nothing like seeing the fruits of your work - the projects I've designed, with each student's personal touches.


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Raised Fret Model

A reader named Walter Page sent me an example of what he recently created with Joint Push Pull, a free SketchUp plugin I described last week. Walter created a cylinder with 27 identical raised frets:



Here's a quick description of how he did it:

The pattern repeats over 5 faces (highlighted below), and there are 27 total frets. So he started with a circle that has 27 x 5 = 135 side. Once the cylinder was created, hidden edges were displayed, and he created the edges needed for one fret:



Here are the faces of the fret, shown in red:



The red faces were rotate-copied around the cylinder 26 times.



All of the red faces need to be selected before using Joint Push Pull, and you can use Select / All with Same Material to get them all at once. Only after all faces are selected should hidden edges be turned off.



Then run Joint Push Pull, and presto. No way could you create these frets so easily without this plugin.



I asked Walter for some info about himself, and here's what he said:

I am 74 years old today, I have worked in the petrochemical industry most of my working life, from apprentice to draughtsman to designer to project engineer and finally to senior project engineer. I am still involved with the industry through an agency and have recently been modelling a process plant for one of my clients, size of the file is approx 150 MB, one of many.

From a very early age I have been interested in Technical Illustration, this was mainly through seeing the centrefold illustrations that appeared in the Eagle comic (Dan Dare). In the early days I used various plastic templates, but with the arrival of the computer age I have been able to achieve my life long wish to produce Eagle type models. I don't see this as a chore, I get great pleasure from it. At the end of the days work I can look at the model and know that I have achieved something.

I first used SketchUp 4 some years ago, at that time I was surprised at what it could do, other similar software was very complicated and too costly. I am self taught and put to rest the saying 'that you can't teach an old dog new tricks' Oh yes you can!

I feel the same way - it's quite satisfying and fun to create something beautiful, even if it's only on your computer. That's why I spend too many late nights doing this stuff...

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Photo in Frame: One Teacher's First Attempt in SketchUp

I got an email from a tech-ed teacher named "Mrs. V," who told me:

I tried your poster lesson for my VERY FIRST try at SketchUp. (Just myself, as a teacher/learner, not with a class.) I attached the drawing. It was fun and generally I had no problems with the directions for a first timer.

Here are her results:



Keep in mind that she had NEVER used SketchUp before, and was immediately able to create a room and group it, then import a photo and place a frame around it. Not bad for a first effort! Her blog about teaching technology is http://fivbert-technologyteacher.blogspot.com.

This wall poster project was included in our September set of SketchUp Projects of the Month. It can also be found online for free (PDF), for anyone who wants to see how these projects are set up. So far, we've heard only good feedback from our subscribers!

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One Teacher's Opinion

Here's an email I recently got from a teacher:

After teaching Geometry for years I have been looking for a way for my students to play with the shapes that are so central to the subject matter. Daniel Pink in a "Whole New Mind" talks about how the skills of the 21st century will revolve around creativity and design and that these skills should be pervasive in education. Integrating SketchUp into my curriculum teaches mathematics along with these important 21st century skills. I have found that SketchUp is a great way for students to experiment with abstract and realistic geometric shapes in their own creative way. They feel a sense of ownership and control over the mathematics in stark contrast to the shapes and designs shown in textbooks.

My students have enjoyed learning the tools of SketchUp because of their love for computers, and I have found that they can manipulate complex shapes without the drudgery of normal construction tools. I had a student create an icosahedron on the second day of class, I had a discussion about symmetry and Platonic solids in a more natural way than would have occurred if I had presented the material as a lecture.

SketchUp is a much more engaging tool for today's students than tractional compass and straight edge. I am a self-taught SketchUp user and 3DVinci has been a great resource for me to learn how to demonstrate geometrical ideas to my students with technology. Once students have made objects in SketchUp I show them the Geometrical theorems that apply to their work, and not just abstract shapes to which they have no connection.

Geometry is all around us and SketchUp allows students to explore the relationships of shapes that exist in their world in a fun and engaging way. Teaching SketchUp in my classroom always results in comments like "wow", "this is so neat", and "look what I created". Students are asking me questions about Geometrical concepts because they want to create and explore the shapes, not because they need to study for a test.

I have found the material in 3DVinci books to be clear and easy for students to follow.

Willy Felton
5th year teacher of Algebra 1, 2, Geometry, Precalculus, Trig
The Community School
Sun Valley Idaho

This absolutely made my day.




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Essential Plug-In: Joint Push Pull

I'm trying about once a month to try out and write about a popular SketchUp plug-in. Previous examples are Component Spray and Draw Metal.

This time the featured plug-in is called Joint Push Pull. Now that I've used it, I don't know how I lived without it (OK, slight exaggeration).

The original plug-in can be found here. (There appears to be a more recent version on www.sketchucation.com but I was having login problems and was unable to download attachments.) To install the plug-in, download the ZIP file and place all its contents into the "Plugins" folder of your SketchUp installation. There's also a link to download the documentation (PDF).

Here are the two icons for the plug-in. I didn't play with Vector Push Pull (the icon on the right), this post is about Joint Push Pull (the icon on the left).



One thing this plug-in can do is push or pull multiple faces at once. As a simple example, I made a box with some side and corner pieces, shown in yellow below).

First you select the faces you want to pull (a face's right-click menu has a conveient option for this: Select / All with same material). Then click the Joint Push Pull tool (also found in the Tools menu). You need to specify the pull distance, and "N" for privileged plane means all pulling will be normal to the face (like a regular Push/Pull). There are also options for what do with original faces, whether to create border faces, etc.


Set your options, click OK, and all faces are pulled out at once. (Which would be rather a pain to do with the regular Push/Pull tool.)


Here's another example, which shows how JPP can be used to pull or push curved surfaces, something impossible to do with SketchUp's provided tools. I started with this model comprised of wavy surfaces.


I used JPP on the green, cyan, and purple faces, each time with a larger extrusion distance.

One thing to keep in mind: faces are projected outward or inward according to their slopes at either end. So in a case like this, the new faces don't line up with the dark blue rectangular face in the back (though this could be easily fixed with the Move tool).

Here's another feature of JPP: you can pull out only certain segments of a face. To do this, you need to have hidden edges displayed (View / Hidden Geometry).


In this example, I selected a few segments each of the yellow, green, and cyan faces, and pulled them out all at once. After some smoothing of edges, adding a few edges, and applying some new colors, I got this:

Here's another example: a vase with projected circles all around. (I created the circles by using the Intersect tool on some cylinders, which I later erased.)

The vase on the left shows all cyan faces pulled outward. The vase on the right shows the faces pushed inward, which means a negative extrusion distance, and the option "Erase original faces."


Finally, JPP can be used to thicken a surface. I created this model using the sandbox tools. I projected and cut out a circle, and projected a square and painted the projected face yellow. I softened all edges except for those surrounding the yellow face (which involved a little trick - making the yellow face a group and then exploding it).

I ran JPP with the option "Reverse Faces (for thickening)." Maybe this doesn't occur with the updated version of JPP, but whether I used a positive or negative extrusion distance, my "front" faces ended up on the inside.

Which is easily fixed by selecting all faces and choosing Reverse Faces from the right-click menu.

This is how the underside looks: the same circular cutout and the projection of the yellow face. The results aren't always perfectly clean, but small errors are easily fixed.

Give this plug-in a try; you'll find lots of uses for it.



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