Jonathan began class with a review of yesterday's Google Earth questions. Students came up
to demonstrate on the projector where and how they had found various things. We looked at
Durham, New York City and its 3D buildings, Paris, China, and Mt. Everest, among other
locations. Jonathan showed how you could find the elevation of the ground anywhere in the
world -- including at a mountain peak -- and how to link from Google Earth to external
sources, such as Wikipedia.
At the end of the class, students were asked what building they wanted to create a model of
in Durham. They decided on the CCB building, and then tried to find it on Google Earth. They
saw that, with a lot of different locations of the bank in the area, it was not necessarily
easy to find it just by searching. It turned out that the shadows cast by tall buildings
helped most in locating it. Students prepared to import the Google Earth map into Sketchup
to start creating their models, but technical difficulties prevented this from happening
today.