The best thing about Sketchup for Schools is that it saves student files to Drive, which means you can treat sketchup files a lot like Google Docs and manage the entire workflow using Google Classroom. In my case this involved sending the instructions to our awesome tech department (who administer our Google Workspace domain) and waiting for them to set it up before proceeding.

Enable Sketchup for Schools for your domain.

This is necessary so that students can log in with their school email/google account. This was a pretty painless process and it didn’t take long.

Students have access to the Solid Inspector tool which I m hoping will help improve success rates when 3d printing student files (at the moment we are focused on exporting to the laser cutter).

It took a bit of doing to fine tune this process, but once we figured it out we were able to import student dxf files to 2D Design in order to laser cut them.

Students can export their finished models as 3d and 2d dxf files (as well as many other file types).

skp sketchup files to Drive (more on how useful this is later).

Students can sign into sketchup using their school google account and they can save their.

In particular, the edu version includes the following extended functionality: It should be noted that Sketchup for Schools ( ) is different from the free online version of Sketchup ( ).

OnShape was a great choice which I might blog about at another time, and despite some misgivings about the functionality of the online version of Sketchup, it ended up facilitating an awesome workflow that I thought was worth sharing. I decided to use OnShape Free with our IGCSE and IB students and Sketchup for Schools with out Year 7 to 9 students. Like many design teachers last year I had to figure out how to teach CAD skills to my students using free online tools.

Sketchup free for schools