Adventures in Origami

I've been on an origami kick recently, and encouraging the habit in the kids.

Origami is useful for a great many things: fine motor control, intuitive understanding of symmetry ("now fold it the same way on the other side"), and three-dimensional visualization ("hold your model in the same orientation as the picture"), to name a few. It's an activity where being careful really does matter if you want to end up with something recognizable, and where practicing makes you better pretty quickly.

Origami EB

During this six-week class we made paper cranes, warblers, and Sonobe Units which can be assembled to form a cube. My favorite class was the one where we made paper cranes out of pieces of paper that started as 5-foot squares!

Three-Headed Dragons

Lukas, Alec, and Max are currently working on the three-headed dragon designed by John Montroll. This is a study in persistence. So far we've spent at least two hours on this beast, and we might be halfway done. The dragons, mine included, currently look like blobs with little tails sticking out.

Area and Volume

Start with a small square piece of paper, side length s. The area of a big square piece of paper with side length 2s is 4 times the area of the small paper, as we can see by putting 4 pieces of origami paper next to each other.

If we make a cube with small pieces of paper (side length s), we get a small cube. If we make a cube with big pieces of paper (side length 2s), we get a big cube. How many small cubes fit inside the big cube? Guesses included 4, 5, 6, 8, and 16. By making a big cube and putting a small cube inside it, we could see that 2 layers of 4 small cubes, for a total of 8, would fit inside.