Continuing to catch up on the news. Last weekend I was in Boston for the 5th annual OrigaMIT convention. Thanks again to Jason and the MIT crew for organizing and putting on a great convention. This year Michelle came up with us, and folded a bunch of cool stuff including a Totoro and some Tom Crain tessellations.
The models I exhibited were in two series, one for each class I taught. The first series was Dodecahedral Flower Ball and its precursors, and the second was more Airplanes and Spaceships, mainly the simpler ones I’ve invented since returning from Centerfold. Uh, fotoz coming soon.
The first class was my Flower Ball, which I recently perfected and folded an a exhibit-level model. This class was very popular; it filled up a big room. I had planned on drawing up some crease patterns beforehand, but like I said it was a busy week. So I thought thru and rehearsed how I was present it on the car ride, which turned out to be just fine. They had large paper to draw and write on at the front of the class, so I was able to just draw out what I needed by hand. They were all advanced folders, which helped alot. The class was attended by people like Tom and Beth Johnson, so I was encouraged that I have something interesting here.
Inspired by last year’s OrigaMIT, I’ve been moving away from simply teaching a single model, and trying to explore what I can get across in a classroom context as far as a system of models goes, or a method or a way of thinking about folding and designing. This is a bit more abstract, so I decided the way to go would be to keep it grounded in a set of examples, and bring across the theory in explaining the connections between them.
So I presented a series of models. The first I’m calling the Square Flower. It’s a stand-along model that’s pretty simple and quite charming. I’ve had it for some time, but considered it basic to publish or teach, until it became the basis for something more. It has the virtue of having all the edges of the original paper ending up on the square outline of the finished model. This means it can be used as a tile unit, and repeated to make tessellations.
The second model I taught was the Pentagon Flower. It’s pretty much the same idea but folded from a pentagon. In order to do that I needed to make a pentagon out of a square. I used Montroll’s method, which I had practiced countless times and looked up the night before just to be sure. Of course you can’t tile a plane with pentagons, which leads us on to the third example.
I went back to the square model, and showed how it could be used to tile a plane. Going one step further, one doesn’t have to tile just a plane, one can tessellate a 3D shape like a cube. As far as I know no one else is doing this in origami except me. So I laid out the theory and then taught the compete Flower Cube. Everyone completed that model and liked the model alot. Beth unfolded hers to be flat for the flight home.
I ended by explaining how to apply the same method to the pentagon and showed the half- and full-dodecahedron variations of the pentagonal Flower Ball. If we had another hour I could have had ‘em get pretty far on the half dodec. As it was, everyone had the knowledge they needed to do the models on their own. Of course the full Dodecahedral Flower Ball is a pretty advanced model, and would take far more time than even a three-hour class would allow. Mine was a one-hour class so the presentation and examples were just right. Everyone got to feel like they learned something without having to do the hard work.
So yeah, crease patterns coming soon too.
