Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Origami Whale

We’ve had a few posts (like this, this, and this) that included paper folding, but this week we really focus on doing it yourself.  Check out Origamiplayer.com, a terrific website that doesn’t just show you origami models.  It has an animator that folds them in front of you and waits for you to fold along with it.  I really like this origami pentagon, but there’s lots of designs and you can even sort them by type or difficulty.  You can change the speed or click around to different steps, so find a model you like and get folding!

Up next, meet the Huang Twins, 14-year old brothers from California.  Mike and Cary have been working as a team to design and program all kinds of great web stuff.  They actually have their own orgami animator to fold polyhedra.  But my favorite thing of theirs is The Scale of the Universe 2, an incredible applet that let’s you compare the sizes of all kinds of things big and small.  It uses scientific notation to describe the sizes, so if you’ve never seen that before, you might want to read up.  It’s genius.

They’ve also written several excellent games, which we’ve added to our Math Games page.  Cube Roll has a familiar format with a twist; The cube has to land on the correct side.  I really like that one.  No Walking, No Problem is another neat little puzzler.  Use the objects to move side to side, because you can’t walk!  Lastly, (though the Huangs didn’t write it) we’ve added Morpion Solitaire, a tough little game you can play online or on paper.

Bon appetit!

Cube Roll

No Walking, No Problem

Morpion Solitaire