Origami Summer

 I like origami like I like singing:  I appreciate it as a spectator not as a do-er.

(As an aside, I find it interesting that in recent years, I have seen a resurgence of interest in both Origami and Chess with the high school crowd.  Both upward trends in popularity seem to predate COVID but the COVID isolation/take-on-a-hobby days would lend themselves to taking on these particular activities I imagine.  Anyway...)

Early this summer (just after the school year), a colleague reached out and asked if I would be willing to help out for one week at an engineering summer camp.  The designated instructor had to leave for the last week of an intensive course on origami and robotics.  By then the campers were working on their projects and I was just kind of like a helper/cheerleader for their independent work.  It was interesting to see what they came up with.  These are the kind of projects school leaders and community members find so fascinating and are always pushing us to do more of in regular school.  The experience reinforced my own take which is that projects are fun, interesting, enriching, but ultimately not super educational.  Perfect for a summer workshop or as a do-it-yourself kit at home.  

Some of the student projects (they were based on these origami robotics kits):

New Arm for Mars Rover

Air-Bag like Bumpers

Robotic Hand

Robotic Leg

Customized Robotic Pillow

Later this same Summer, we visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens where they were having an outdoor Origami sculpture exhibit (technically origami-inspired) by Jennifer and Kevin Box:

"Inverted" - showing the fold lines only

Atlanta Botanical Garden's signature piece in the background! 

As I fold up my summer-time memories and encode them into long term storage in a specific combination of new weighting between my dendrites and their adjacent neurons in my own brain, I ponder how the multidimensional nature of my memories of the summer get reduced to those simple factors in my brain.  In order to do any thinking at all, my cellular machinery gets unpacked from a linear array of encoded instructions.  All the 3D geometry of biochemistry springing into being from a linear array:

Well, I guess I've not only been immersed in Origami this summer, but it's immersed in me as well...