This project was very interesting to me. I have done a lot of origami growing up and I find the way that we can twist one single sheet of paper into so many shapes to be fascinating. I have made the icosahedron that we made in class before by myself in high school, but the artwork by Neel Shrestha caught my eye because although it was a similar shape, I couldn't quite figure out how it all attached.
After we had selected the piece, I told my group that I would help them learn how to make it since I had the most experience with origami and I found Neel's instructions online of how he created it. I haven't done anything complicated with origami in years so figuring out what each part of the instructions meant was a little satisfying puzzle. In particular, there was a part where we had to use creases to "twist" two triangles shut which was immensely gratifying to have click into place. This piece also quickly showcased the math built into origami- the first step was folding a square into an equilateral triangle which was super cool.
Figuring out that first piece took me over half an hour and while we were making the rest of them as a group, we realized quickly that there would be no way that we could teach the class how to make that particular piece in five minutes because the base unit was too difficult for a beginner. This was obvious from the fact that it took me several minutes to help Doreen and Yikang with their first pieces, and that was a two on one instruction ratio. Based on this restriction, we decided to go with showing the class the Sonobe unit, which has a much simpler folding process.
Doing the demonstration for the class taught me a few things very quickly. For one, using descriptive language is very important and will help everyone keep on the right track. I hadn't fully thought through the fact that students wouldn't be able to simultaneously look at my paper and their own, so coming up with analogies such as the double doors or precisely describing which point on the paper we were folding from and to was key. In addition, emphasizing points where it would be easy to go wrong was important. The thing about teaching origami is that every step is important and needs to be executed with a fair amount of precision in order for the whole piece to fit together. I can see how this could be a problem with classes that aren't listening as closely.
I really wish that we had been able to have a bit more time for the demo so that we could've asked the class to start playing around with the pieces that they made and see what they could create. The Sonobe units can also be put together in structures of 3, 6, and 12 before you need the 30 to make our icosahedron. It would've been very interesting to see if they could've made them and I think that this would be an awesome exercise to do with actual classes as well. It gets them thinking about geometry, but in a way that's almost like playing with legos.
Overall, I think that making this art piece and doing origami in general is a fun (and cheap!) way to get students thinking about geometry. You can scale the difficulty of what you're doing to ensure that everyone is capable of contributing. I believe that this would be a fun activity to do in the first couple of days of class, where you end up with an icosahedron with everyone's names on it. It creates a sense of community and reaffirms that everyone is one part of the whole class, as well as creating a memento for you as a teacher to remember your class by.
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