Mr. Bowditch and Sketchup

So for my mini-book club I read Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham. Though considered a children's book, it masterfully turns a mathematical genius into an understandable guy. And it gave wonderful insight on the history and emotions of the time period. After some discussion in my group about what book to choose, we were deciding between books on the Great Works list, a book that we wanted to learn from and then be able to share, and one that wouldn't overwhelm us in the week allotted to read it. Hence our choice, thanks to Maggie's suggestions. You can check out my group's presentations if you'd like more in-depth on the novel with Kevin's Prezi, Maggie's book review, Brian's post, and Megan's posts.

In deciding what to do for this project, I wanted to try something challenging and something I'd never attempted before. Hence I stumbled upon Google SketchUp, the ultimate (at least for me) 3D modeling program. On the Google homepage, click on more then go to even more. You will find SketchUp under a list of tools/programs. Then you can download a free version and watch numerous tutorial videos on all the finer points. The basic premise of the program is to draw shapes and then pull them up into 3D. Originally designed for interior designers, architects, and engineers, it is fairly simple to use. You can create basic sketches of buildings and to get the "general idea" of something. Or you can make elaborate crazy designs. Click here to check out their amazing gallery. I set out to build a ship, not by divine command, but by my our initiative. I was able to find a preexisting model and work off of that. The only problem now is that as I try to upload the image of what I did, other formats are not meant for 3D or the .skp format. So I used previous tools such as screencast to capture an image of what I did.


Ta-da! Not the best image quality compared to the amazing 3D work within the program. Additionally I uses many of the descriptions from the book to try and make it accurate.
Go try it!