The past week has brought us a few examples of high school students using Google SketchUp to model their school and town.
The first comes from Paragould High School in Paragould, Arkansas. A few students there have been working with SketchUp to model some of the buildings on their campus. They’ve only done two so far, they but they have plans for more. You can fly there using this KML file or read this story on the KAIT website. The article is not very well-written (it almost looks like it was auto-translated from English to a foreign language and back again), but the subject of the story is pretty neat.
The second comes from Hartford High School in Hartford, Vermont. Teacher Michael Hathorn introduced his class to SketchUp and they’ve now added more than 75 models from their city to the 3D Warehouse; over 50 of them have already been added to Google Earth!

For more, you can read their story on the Google SketchUp blog, fly to Hartford using this KML file

About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
I teach math in Italy in Junior High School (you posted about our works some time ago) and let the kids
use Sketchup one hour a week. This year they worked really well and
produced really interesting stuff …
What I want to point you out is our last video about the Troy War: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcYCuhTgwqY
All models were ( http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=94801251d548575b632c440f9d2cd146&prevstart=0&scoring=p ) made by the students, I made the video.
thanks,
guzman.
You can read more about the project here:
http://3dvinci.blogspot.com/2010/05/now-this-is-class-project.html
These sketch-ups looks more and more promising every update and I hope they do the same for vegetation and forests:
It would be nice to have actual vegetation/shrubbery for Google Earth in a “layer” which you can uncheck if it becomes too cluttered:
Forest Firefighters could use that data to determine which forests are at risk the most or prevent diseases and other useful features I most likely can’t think of: