Friday, April 11, 2008

Hyperbolic paraboloid

Today I tried something rather more challenging with origami than I have ever done before; in the past, I've taught young children (little learning sponges) to do origami, and we start from scratch, with simple models, and work up gradually to harder models.
But this afternoon, I taught more than 150 teenagers to fold a hyperbolic paraboloid: it's not a particularly difficult fold, but there are a few challenging steps, and I'd usually like to be able to go and see each one individually, and check that they are getting it all right.
The setup was that we had a vertical camera positioned above my folding surface, projected onto a big screen, and a microphone so that everyone could hear me.
And I have to say, I'm impressed with all the students: all but a handful of them did a wonderful job!
Of course, they were to an extent self-selected: they were participating in a calculus competition, so they were already a bit math-y and perhaps a bit geeky to start with.

Yours, delighted with the success of the attempt,
N.

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