The lure of a website offering room and home design was too strong. Over the last few days the boys have spent hours designing and building. K has decided he wants to be an architect. One half of me is beating itself up for failure to teach conjunctions - the other is applauding itself for the spontaneous pursuit of an activity which is the pinnacle of the home ed freedom-to-learn philosophy.
Home.By.Me was the best site I found for flexibility and cost as you're allowed 3 free projects once registered. There's a Google login option and no limit to the size of each project so the boys have set up three 'worlds' and each one is focussed on a different type of building. You've got 2D and 3D views to play with.
So far the boys have created a mansion, flat, dream bedroom, cafe, pub, dorms, storage facilities, offices, playrooms...
For 3D spatial awareness this is a superb bit of kit and there are lots of ways to use this software to link to other curriculum areas - we might try some of these over the next few weeks :
- Design a room on a fixed budget (research costs of items, spreadsheets & budgeting)
- Recreate a room in our house on HomeByMe (maths skills - measurements)
- How much paint / carpet do we need? (maths skills - working out area, rounding up)
- Build a house/room only using items from <period in history> (history)
- Design a house with tessellating rooms (maths)
- Decorate a room using primary colours / complementary colours / etc (art & design)
- Build a house of size X which can house at least X people with basics only (current affairs, displacement, ethics)
- Design a maze (logic, maths)
Link : https://home.by.me/en/
