a couple years ago, I was teaching a workshop on advanced SketchUp
techniques to a group of extremely bright middle and high school (or
so I thought) students in Hot Springs, Arkansas. As subject matter went, I
wasn’t pulling any punches — we were breezing through material I wouldn’t
think of introducing to most groups of adults. At one point, a boy raised his
hand to ask a question, and I noticed he looked younger than most of the
others. Squinting, I read a logo on his T-shirt that told me he was in elementary
school. “You’re in sixth grade?” I asked, a little stunned. These kids were
motoring, after all. The boy didn’t even look up. He shook his head, doubleclicked
something, and mumbled, “Third.” He was 8 years old.
SketchUp was invented back in 1999 by a couple of 3D industry veterans (or
refugees, depending on your perspective) to make it easier for people to see
their ideas in three dimensions. That was it, really — they just wanted to
make a piece of software that anyone could use to build 3D models. What I
saw in Arkansas makes me think they were successful.
Before it was acquired in 2006 by Google, SketchUp cost $495 a copy, and it
was already a mainstay of architects’ and other designers’ software toolkits.
No other 3D modeler was as easy to understand as SketchUp, meaning that
even senior folks (many of whom thought their CD/DVD trays were cup
holders) started picking it up. These days, SketchUp is being used at home,
in school, and at work by anyone with a need to represent 3D information the
way it’s meant to be represented: in 3D. Google SketchUp (as it’s now called)
is available as a free download in six languages and is just as popular internationally
as it is in North America.
