Sunday, October 6, 2013

Robert Lang: The Math and Magic of Origami

Robert Lang does a TED talk on The Math and Magic of Origami. This interested me because my Dad taught me to make an origami cube and a bird that flapped its wings when I was 8 or 9 and I have been fascinated with origami ever since. I liked how Lang showed how math was responsible for the leaps and bounds that have been made in origami. The ways this technology can be used in real life was very impressive from being able to fold panels in order to get them into space or fold a stint to get it into the human body. This could be an intersting way to show students the connection between math and the real world. Lang also talks about Tree Maker, software he developed to create a crease pattern for the base of an origami creation. I would like to try using this as an exploration in a Geomotry and Spatial Sense unit. I think students could get very creative in making their own origami creations. Robert Lang: The Math and Magic of Origami

2 comments:

  1. Origami is an incredible application of mathematics. For starters, most think of math only in terms of number crunching and not the geometrical aspects of it. Also, it is a common application that you can show to almost anyone to show them how much they rely on math. In teacher's college, a group did an interesting project that had us trying to make origami with different instructions. Some were great, some not so much. This is a translation of what different teaching methods can mean to the students on material that is more or less foreign to anyone.

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  2. This is an incredible way to show the connection between math and the real world. Especially since it is used to solve different problems. Once again it shows how math is everywhere in the world!

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