However, this supervening situation offers us the opportunity to enquire about which ICT resources are potentially interesting for our training purposes. Higher Education has not been spared either, and has had to adapt fast to blended and on-line training contexts where the use of new technologies has been imposed as a non-negotiable need. You can also apply for free one year educational licenses for the Pro version.The circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, which we are currently experiencing worldwide ( Hodges et al., 2020 Porlán, 2020 UNESCO, 2020), affect all areas of society, and generate important social, personal and economic difficulties. The free trial includes the Pro version of the software, but reverts back to the free Make version at the end of the 30 day trial period. To access the software, you download the free trial and select the “SketchUp Make” version. SketchUp is desktop software, available as a free download for educational use. To help you with these steps, iMaterialise have produced a really useful article for 3D Printing with SketchUp. It may also be worth considering using SketchUp alongside Meshmixer for preparing the 3D model files. However once students are familiar with the process for checking and preparing the file they should be able to do this independently.

One drawback of SketchUp is that it is not straightforward to produce a 3D printable model file from a design as it is a surface modeller. We recommend SketchUp for students in upper KS2 and upwards although younger students will need support in checking and preparing their models for 3D printing.

Shapes can be moved and grouped to build up the 3D drawing. Models are created by drawing 2D shapes on one of the 3D planes then pushing and pulling the shapes into 3 dimensional forms. SketchUp is a powerful 3D CAD program that is simpler for students to learn than many other Professional CAD software.

Sketchup free for schools