NMOS Booth Exhibit

Earlier today, I was presenting at the National Mathematical Olympiad of Singapore (NMOS) Finals, and after that I set up a booth at my school's concourse to showcase the origami models from my project "Folding Prismatoids with 3-D Origami". The visitors included the participants of NMOS (Primary School students) and their parents and teachers. Some of the parents and teachers asked me where they could find the pictures of my exhibits, so I have created a Flickr account to house those pictures. Click here to view the photos.

The Prosperity model is featured in an earlier post, here. For visitors who got my blog URL today, please feel free to look around the blog and see the previous posts or leave comments!

To the readers of this blog, you may want to look at Carlos Natan's Flickr account. The work I did in my project is surprisingly similar to what he has been doing, but we focus on different aspects of the same thing; I'm trying to generalise to all sorts of shapes, while he does beautiful variations of prisms. If you like my work, see his too!

Here I wish to highlight two posts. The previous post (here) features Joel Cooper, an American origami folder who folds tesselations and masks. Sounds dull? Check this slideshow! Now that's cool origami. No cuts, one piece of paper - you can still get lots of stunning variation from it, and that's one of the joys of doing purist origami.

The second post is the post before the one about Joel Cooper, and it's about the upcoming 5OSME, or 5th Origami for Science, Mathematics and Education Convention which will be held in Singapore. Details are here in the post. The trailer in that post is a must-see!!

Joel Cooper

Please follow this link to Joel Cooper's blog, and this for an awesome slideshow.

Yes, when I first saw those, I went speechless too ^_^

He does tesselations and pops faces and other shapes out of them. I used to think it's almost impossible to make complicated curved surfaces in origami, but there you go :)

5th International Conference on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education

Now I know what the full name of "5OSME" is.

As readers of this blog will know, i'm part of an informal group of Origami folders in Singapore, called (surprise surprise) Origami Singapore. Next July, the group is going to organize 5OSME, which is something something "Origami for Science, Mathematics and Education". It's going to be an awesome event with seminars where people present papers on the relation between origami and science and stuff like that, a free public exhibition and origami classes! For the program of the last convention, 4OSME, click here.

What I'll be anticipating as well is the screening of Between The Folds, an origami documentary! It's about origami and science and art, and from the trailer below you can already see that the documentary is gonna be good stuff.



I'll post about definite details for 5OSME when I can, so please support the event next July! ^_^



Origami as Pure as Snow
Shonen

Revival

Long time no see! I just realised that my blog died on September 11 2008.

The purpose of this post is to highlight what's gone on after my blog died, and the thing that kept me busy throughout the holidays...

First, my exams ended, and there were post-exam activities. One afternoon after such an activity, a math teacher suggested to me to do a math project on origami. I was quite ready at that time because I knew a lot of results I had (my "building block method") and could extend for the project. I started on it in mid-November, and burnt my holidays away working on a report in almost all of my free time, but it was all worth it. I finished a 49-page and over 11,000-word report for my project "Folding Prismatoids Using a Form of 3-D Origami". What my project did was to investigate how to use geometrical constructs (e.g. perpendicular lines, midpoints) to draw lines on paper, i.e. draw a crease pattern with black mountain folds and red valley folds etc. such that when the crease pattern is folded it becomes a 3-D Prismatoid sticking out of the paper. It all started with the cuboid Building Blocks, which I extended to Convex Prisms (check out the Prismatoid link!), Concave Prisms, Convex Frusta, Concave Frusta, Convex Pyramids, Wedges and Convex Cupolas. Because my methods needed a special form of net of the final solid as a basis, my report also included a way for users to generate those nets of a random shape even if they don't know how it looks like in real life.

My project was submitted to the Singapore Mathematics Project Festival 2009 (SMPF), and it proudly won the Gold medal (2nd Place) and the Creativity and Originality Prize! Check the results here (Senior Section). I might also be publishing a shorter version of my report in the Mathematical Medley, a biannual publication of the Singapore Mathematical Society.

The next things that happened were that the same math teacher again gave me two opportunities: setting up a booth during my school's annual Speech Day, and conducting a June workshop for gifted primary school students, both of which I accepted eagerly.

First up was Speech Day. I rallied together my Origami models (half of which you can find in this blog and the rest created during my SMPF project), wiped off the dust and boxed them up for transport to school. I also created a summarised version of my SMPF finals presentation slides for use at the booth. On Speech Day itself, the principal mentioned my project as one of the achievements our students have made so far. The guest of honour, Lim Chuan Poh, chairman of A*STAR, then came to visit all the booths that were set up in the school concourse. He was quite impressed with my project, and he also requested to take back one of my models with him. He knew how to pick, he took my Concave Prism, one of the hardest to make!! ^_^

After Speech Day, the same math teacher again suggested that I could set up the same booth for the school's Open House. I accepted happily again, and set up my booth (with the same models from Speech Day) again today at school. Lots of parents came and asked me about my project, and I explained to each one of them the gist of the project. What I said to each of them was something like this:

(opens up one of the models) "See the lines on the paper? The main purpose of this project was to investigate how to draw the correct lines on any piece of paper so after folding it becomes a 3-D solid sticking out of the paper." (Folds the model again) "I created many methods to do so and produced many different shapes as well." (Points to other models in my project)
(Points to other "Building Block" models) "These are special cases of my methods because Their folds align with a square grid. This is an easier case, so I can manipulate it more easily to get more complicated products."
(Parent Q & A)

I manned the booth for about 5 hours!!! So tiring hahaha

That's it! The next event coming up is the June workshop, hope it will be a success! ^_^

Green Origami

In Math (Trigo) class, my teacher was giving out these mint chocolates to the class, and after I finished eating mine I realized that I had quite a nice bit of foil-backed paper right in front of me. I just had to hide the plastic edges and I had a nice long rectangular piece of folding material. After fiddling a bit with it, pleating it and making random reverse folds, I thought that maybe I could make an arm with fingers out of it. It's a rather basic skill, used rather commonly in boxpleating to form hands with recognisable fingers. I'm not gonna go too deeply into it, but I think you should be able to reverse-engineer it from the pictures anyway.



And the underside...



Should be quite clear now ^_^

Then, I saw the wrapper left on the table by my neighbour and I was still bored, so I took it and folded another hand so I now have a matching set (With the thumbs in the right place, of course). Then I got hold of another few wrappers and started folding legs.



A view of the foot from its owner's perspective (i.e. looking downwards):


By the way, I've finished off all the dark-coloured paper I have, so I had to use my Year One Orientation T-shirt to provide the black background. I did that witht he last post too. (:

I quickly made a matching set of legs again, and I started having fun placing the "emo frog parts" into interesting arrangements.



The part providing the "body" and "head" is actually a sample of the original sweet. Mint Chocloates yum ^_^

Someone remarked that when viewed at an angle, it kinda looks like someone in a traffic accident.



Ouch.

In case you're wondering, the book I used was a copy of Hikaru No Go manga.

That was fun, random doodles in class are always the best ^_^

These techniques are always useful, so it's good to rememeber them.

Ta-ta!



Origami as Pure as Snow
Shonen

Origami Cards

Sorry sorry sorry sorry for killing this blog for two months, I've been really busy and tired all this time... forgive me forgive me T_T

I hope not many people stopped visiting this blog because of the lack of activity...

I shall do a post stuffed with pictures to make up for it ^_^

First up is a random doodle that I did during Biology class because I was too bored.



I made it out of an envelope I found in class:



You might be able to see how I folded it now =D

Next up is a folded version of the 202 class logo created by tiong suan.





Please don't kill me if it looks crappy, because 1) I was bored and tired at that time 2) This was a prototype that I did with printing paper 3) 30% of my mind was on the Beijing Olympics Opening

The following are the most important; remember the building blocks? Well, instead of using a boring square grid, why not use an equilateral triangle grid instead? I came up with a hexagonal and triangular building block...







and this is what they look like from the flipside...





Warning: the previous picture might prove to be misleading if you use it to try and figure out the folding method.

The above models can function like building blocks; their dimensions can be varied to a certain extent.

Surprisingly, I also managed to fold a little tetrahedron sticking out of the paper.





The flipside...



Mysteriously, this picture always turned out rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise when I tried to upload it on blogger. The problem was solved when I rotated the picture file myself one whole round then trying again.

Its negative version...



... and its flipside.



Finally, here's a cool model that I did during the Origami Singapore meetup today



Cool, eh?

Hmmm I might post CPs some other day... *yawn*

seeya~




Origami as Pure as Snow
Shonen

Cross Grave - Variations

Hi everyone!

Following my Cross Grave post, Cupcake, another folder, did a variation on the cross model that turned out very well. ^_^ He kindly allowed me to show you guys his model, which changes the dimensions of the original cross (7 x 5) to a smaller one (4 x 3). The model become smaller and easier to fold, but most importantly, it shows how a versatile folder can change a design if he plans it well enough.

Click here to see cupcake's model in his flickr account (I had the picture but somehow it doesn't show up)

Very nicely done! Judging from the picture, I thought he used a 15 x 15 grid for this model (but he told me that it was really 16 x 16 ^_^) ; a very interesting feature of this type of "pop-out" origami is that any square grid can be used. Theoretically, the paper can be extended without bound on all four sides, but the model, jutting out from the centre and thus not needing the edges and corners, will remain intact. This is what gives "pop-out" origami an unlimited (at least, in my opinion) potential for the combination of models.

Now for a little exercise: how many squares does this cross take up from the paper? Try it out if you're interested!

As to how Cupcake managed to make his cross, it probably went something like this: please refer to the pictures in my last post, and scroll down to the second picture from the top. In that step, instead of forming two 2 x 1 x 1 building blocks each two squares away from the central square, he folded two 1 x 1 x 1 building blocks each one square away from the central square.
He then proceeded on with the rest of the steps until his cross reached a certain height. Folders may want to try this model out, and more adventurous ones (with very thin paper available) may want to extend the method to make a cross with dimensions 10 x 7! (figure out how I arrived at those two magical figures yourself ^_^)

I hope this post has managed to convince you guys that it is possible to create variations of models with enough planning! Then again, if any of you guys have folded any of my models, please let me know, and I may feature it on this blog!

Thank you very much Cupcake for folding my models! ^_^



Origami as Pure as Snow
Shonen