ScratchUp! A cunning combination of Sketchup (3D CAD) and Scratch (Coding)

This is ScratchUp! A cunning combination of Sketchup (3D CAD) and Scratch (Coding) to bring your pupils’ programming projects to life!

The idea for this emerged after teaching my classes Sketchup as a specific CAD tool within the DT curriculum to design lunar buggies, before then proceeding to the build stage. I was so impressed at their grasp of the software and 3D design as a concept, that I wanted to set a new challenge.

Similarly, they had progressed extremely well in my computing lessons until they were quite proficient using coding constructs and concepts within Scratch, so what was the next step?

I noticed that their sprite and background design within Scratch always fell short of their best, probably as they were so keen to code and get their project working. It was all coloured blobs and stick men; purely functional, but little in the way of inspiring graphical user interfaces!

Enter: Sketchup. I decided that they could use their design skills to create high quality sprites, then export them as a 2D graphic to be loaded into Scratch as a costume.

And then it hit me.

Why not export a series of rotations of a 3D sprite, load multiple images into a sprite’s costume, then animate it, so it appears as a rotating 3D sprite?

The possibilities are endless! Take a look around this resource which includes my presentation from the CAS (Computing at School) National Conference 2018, the list of angles I used for my car direction, my ScratchUp examples, pupil Sketchup and ScratchUp examples and a Sketchup help sheet.

Let me know how you get on!!!

www.rundontwalk.co.uk