Origami IS Math

Let’s say you are NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) ~

~and you want to send a starshade (think: baseball diamond) into space on a rocket (think: canoe) what sort of engineer would you hire?

Someone like Robert J. Lang, who created the folding ~ and unfolding ~ mirrors and sunshield for NASA’s  James Webb telescope, or Manyan Arya who teaches at Stanford?

What if one of your students wanted the job? They would have to take some advanced classes first, perhaps from Erik Demaine at MIT, one of the featured origami artists in the fascinating video: Between the Folds.  Fortunately, even students who don’t plan to work at NASA  benefit from knowing origami:

Origami in Technology and Engineering:

• Art or Engineering? PBS (4 min)
• Emergency Shelters, nature videos (5:49 min)
• In Space, BBC ~ Made for Students, interesting for adults(4:19)
• Robot Origami ~ MIT  great images of the cutest nanobot ever! ~ (2:43)
• Rigid Twisting (geeky but interesting), BYU Compliant Mechanisms Research Group (2:54)
• Origami Robots, TED great for students! (12 min)
• Future of Tech Venture City ~ Great overview of future!(13 min)
• Paper to Bionics  History of Folding, Free Engineering Documentary (51:55 min)
• Acoustic Origami Melbourne School of Design (2 min)
• Art and Science Lecture with Slides Aalto University (1 hour+)
• Volumetric Origami Structure with in situ transition . . (space tech?) Hiromi Yasuda (38 seconds)
• Mechanical Engineering BYU (3min)
• Nanofabrication via DNA Origami ~ Science Communication Lab (40 min) Skip to 11:50 minute marker for a comprehensible (to me) sentence. Then skip to 14:15 minute marker for more understandable information!)
• DNA Origami helps Destroy Bacteria ~ CGTN Europe –  Fantastic for 6 th grade and older (9:11 min)
• How DNA Origami works – Technovation – Made for young students. (3 min)
• Folding at a nanoscale – CNN – Older students will benefit (8 min)
• Engineering with Origami ~ Veritasium – great images (18 min)
• How Origami is Revolutionizing Industrial Design Smithsonian
• Keeping it in the Fold UNE Discovery Voyager
• Unfolding the Future of Origami National Geographic

Origami in Education:

STEAM loving students can simply enjoy folding increasingly complex models. Not just a cost effective fidget, origami helps students make sense of geometry, fractions, and problem solving. Folding origami models benefits math students in several ways:

• Five Benefits of Origami from paperpapers
• Five Reasons why Origami Improves Students’ Skills Edutopia
• Influence of Origami on Mathematics Study Scientific Research
• Math and Magic of Origami TED video (18 min)
• Origami Boosts Mindfulness Psychology Today
• Where Every Child Counts! Japan Society

Bring Origami into your Math Class:

• Fold a Bear ~ UnCommon Core ~ easy origami activity
• Instructions for Simple Origami Leaf ~ UnCommon Core
• 19 Extra Simple Lesson Ideas Using Origami Bored Teachers
• How NASA Uses Origami… Seeker ~ Made for students (4:20 min)
• Science of Innovation NBC Learn –  Made for students (5 min)