Designing spaces can be an interesting activity in several subjects, starting at the conceptual stage with digital prototyping, and including trial of solutions, without a great deal of effort. We could use a Floorplanner to design:

In the good old days, when computers were rare, I built a music studio with an old friend of mine. At that time, we had neither the money nor the fancy digital floor planners, so we just used the usual techniques of buying cheap stuff, and trial and error, moving instruments and equipments repeatedly until we found the perfect configuration. We got egg boxes from a friend who had a cake factory, some old carpets from a neighbor, cork and Styrofoam for the doors, walls, and ceiling, and an old hatch to make a window in a previously-scary, dark, and humid basement. We were thrilled with the result—a decent studio from little money. I remember we called it Studio 2, as at that time I had a 1990 Mini of that model. That's where I got the idea for the following course activity.

In Module 6, Spaces for music, following the budgeting of the studio, we saw previously with Google Drive, students are asked to create a 3D representation of the studio of their dreams by using an online Floorplanner tool.

Floorplanner (http://www.floorplanner.com) is an online planning tool that allows us to create one floor plan for free, which can be seen in 3D and embedded anywhere, including, in our Moodle courses.

After signing up and logging in, we are taken to Dashboard, where we can manage our account and create our first project by clicking on Create new project, as shown in the following screenshot.

We can then start entering the details for the floor plan, and, when done, hit the Create Project button as shown in the following screenshot:

Creating a room

We are then presented with the workspace, with a sidebar on the left and a drawing interface on the right:

The steps is to create our music studio are:

1. Click on the draw room icon in the Construction toolbar present at the upper-right corner. The mouse pointer changes to a black cross.
2. Click on the squared area, and drag the mouse to make a rectangle of the size that you want for your studio.

Adding a floor

Now, let's add a floor to our room. We need to double-click on the surface inside the room that we've just created, and then select one of the patterns for the floor of our room from the pop-up window:

Adding construction elements

We can now add doors, windows, and walls to the plan. For example, if we click on the door icon in the Construction toolbar, we will get a library of elements that we can drag onto the plan, such as doors and windows.

Adding furniture elements

To add furniture and other elements to the studio, we should use the search field in the sidebar, and enter the required furniture name.

We can then drag the elements to the plan and position them where we want them.

We can rotate the elements, move them around, and if we click on the furniture, we can also change its properties, duplicate, or delete them.

Saving and publishing

We have to make sure that we save our design before leaving the Floorplanner, by using the save changes notice located on top of the drawing area.

If we click on the 3D button above the Construction toolbar, we can see a three-dimensional view of the plan.

Once we're done, we have at least two options to add our floor plan to Moodle:

• Export as image
• Embed

Export as image

In the menu at the upper-right corner, above the Construction toolbar, the first button on the left allows us to export the plan as an image:

On a free account, the only image size allowed is 640 × 480 px. We can later upload this file to Moodle, as we saw in Chapter 2, Picture This.

Embed

If we want to embed or link to it from within Moodle, we should go to the upper-right corner of the web page, and click on My account.

In the left menu, after clicking on the Projects item, there's a button Actions next to our project.

We can get the embed code provided, and add it to our course.