Origami tsuru DIY

The art of folding paper is called Origami.
Origami (etymological meaning: fold(ori) and paper(Kami)), is the art of folding paper without using instruments like scissors or glue. It´s possible to fold paper to form figures, some more complex then others, some using a single sheet some using more.

Origami was born in Japan, in middle age. This art was very formal, and was related with religious ceremonies.

The true is everyone knows how to do origami, the simple paper hat or the famous paper boat, are simple origami folding. Origami is a wonderful art that captivates everyone from 8 to 80.
 
In Japan every folded paper figure has a different and symbolic meaning. As an example:

• Frog: symbolizes love and fertility;  
• Turtle: symbolizes longevity; 
• Tsuru (the bird that often symbolizes origami art), also known as grou or stork, symbolizes good luck, happiness and health.

About tsuru
Tsurus are big and beautiful birds, they are full of color and it's a sacred bird in Japan.

An hermit is a person who lives alone without any luxury. The story says that nn Japan some of this hermits lived in mountains with this birds as companions. It's said this hermits had extra human powers- they here capable to stop aging. For this reason the Tsuru is known as the "longevity bird".

Some believe that if you fold 1000 tsurus and at the same time wish something that wish will become true, other believe if you are ill you will get better as fast as the number of tsurus you fold.

Use the schema to fold your first tsuru, it's not hard just requires some skill.

Or try the movie:

Origami is recognized as an educational resource for over 100 years. The first square 15cm papers begun to appear in the third decade of the century XX (paper used nowadays to make origami).

Today, origami has been shown to be an important aid in teaching basic geometry and develop motor skills and individual creativity.

Resources: Núcleo de tecnologia educacional de Jaraguá do Sul; Mundo Nipo; Baú do Professor

Et voilá!

Keep going, 999 to go!

Enjoy!

Newton discs, How do they work?

Sunlight has no color, that's why it is known as white light. In fact the white light is a mix of different colors, these colors are visible only when light passes through a transparent object such as glass, and decomposes in all colors, this effect is commonly called rainbow and scientifically called spectrum.

The spectrum consists of seven colors:

• red; 
• orange; 
• yellow; 
• green; 
• blue; 
• indigo; 
• violet.  

Today we will do a "magic disc"- the Newton disc. We will learn that white light is made by mixing all these 7 colors.

What we need:

• pencil,
• scissors,
• thick white card,
• crayons, markers will do,
• ruler,
• compass,
• protractor.

How to:

1. Cut the card in a circle, use a compass;
2. Use the protractor to divide it into 7 parts, like in the picture, sections of 55 º, 60 º and 35 º;
3. Paint each piece with a spectrum of colors, the figure shows the red, the orange, the yellow, the green, the blue, the indigo and the violet. Paint it as uniformly as possible and use the same intensity with all the colors;
4. Make a hole in the middle of the circle and pass the pencil through it, the center of the circle is where the "hole" of the compass is;
5. Spin the pencil quickly, like a top, look at the color wheel, adjust as necessary to rotate the set easily.

What happens?
The disc appears as a grayish white tone.

Why?
In fact if the conditions were optimized we would see a clean white circle, without the grayish tone.

The colors painted on the wheel are the main colors of the white light, like those that are present in the rainbow. When the wheel spins it creates a visual effect that makes your brain believe that they mingle and wheel appears white when in reality it´s multicolored.

This is a demonstration, turn the test in to an experiment, experiment with different color combinations. Here are two suggestions: red, blue and green, or red and green for example, what happens? Why?

Et Voila!
After all the white has a lot of color

Enjoy it!

Origamic Architecture

My restless Mind stop in this paper crafts, I just love them, ad makes me think about those chidre books with pop up images. I hope you like them.
You can check more origami iformation here. Some of the designs are simpler then others but they are all wonderful:

Gal in Black

Artist: Ingrid Siliakus

Artist: Willem

Ingrid Siliakus, Amsterdam

Gal in Black

Artist: Willem

Sources:
thepompomist.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/origamic-architecture/
frogsmoke.com/2008/02/25/origamic-architecture/
toxel.com/inspiration/2008/12/01/beautiful-and-creative-paper-art-creations/

Et voilá!
Amazing uh?

Enjoy!

Art with beach stones

Your restless can role play with this. Make a masterpiece with beach stones.
This is another summer craft you can do all year, is always fun and they love it.
Buy an art board, or make yourself one with a piece of wood, and invite your restless to make art with stones, the result always work.

What we need:

• beach stones, several formats and colors,
• art board,
• white glue
• charcoal,
• beach sand, optional
• acrylic paint, optional,
• varnish, optional,
• brush, optional.

How to:

1. Wash all the stones, first with water and after with alcohol;
2. Separate the stones by color, size and format;
3. With a charcoal, draw, with light strokes, the design you wish to replicate with the stones, for some restless the "we will see as we go" works best;
4. Geometric designs always work in this project, triangles, circles, straight lines...
5. Apply white glue on the art board;
6. One by one, glue the stones to the board as you with, to form the design you want. Use colors, formats and sizes to do the pattern;
7. After you finish spread the sand on it, the sand will glue to the "empty spaces";
8. Let it dry for 24h;
9. You can paint stones outlines with acrylic paint if you wish, let it dry for 4;
10. Before varnish remove the sand.

Et Voilá!
Hang your master piece on the wall, and wait for next summer.

Enjoy!

Tangram- some cool videos about this math puzzle

Today, on invited restless mind, we have some videos for you about Tangram:

And to finish, my favourite:

Et voilá!
7 dancing "tans" to make nice images, can you do it?

Enjoy!

Painting old CD's

We found this Tutorial here it’s a very good idea to reuse old CD's and DVD's rather than throw them in the trash and besides, this will keep children occupied for a while

What we need:

• Paint tutorial says it can be acrylic or nail polish. Use synthetic lacquer for longstanding results,
• CDs and/or DVD's old and broken,
• Varnish.

How to:

1. If you want to leave your CD or DVD transparent, sand it, with thin sand paper, when you done wash it and dry it well;
2. If you want to keep the "mirror" effect just clean it with alcohol to remove any grass and dust. You can apply paint on the "label" side;
3. Let your restless paint the CD/DVD;
4. Wait at least 24h before you varnish it.

You can paint geometric figures or use a stencil.

This CD/DVD's can be used for a lot of things. We can place them in the wall, one by one or as a set, we can frame them, or build some, dream catchers...

Et voilá!
Young restless will love to explore this circular canvas.

Enjoy!

Tangram legend- Yu and God of Thunder

We can find a lot of legends about Tangram, its impossible to know witch one is true. we found 4 different versions about the origin of this millenary game. The first three are the most common, but the fourth one is the most surprising and interesting. 

The messenger and the Emperor
"Once upon a time 4000 ago, a messenger came to the Emperor Tan with a square mirror, when he dropped to the ground. But he dropped the mirror on the ground and it shattered into seven pieces.
The messenger tried to join the seven pieces in order to reassemble the square. While trying to solve the problem, the messenger has created hundreds of types of people, animals, plants, until finally he made it. "
from here

The disciple and the master
"Once upon a time a young chinese was saying goobye to his master.He was about to take a great trip around the world.
On this occasion, the master handed him a square mirror and said:
-With this mirror, record everything you see on your trip to show me when you get back.
The disciple, surprised, asked:
-But master, how can I show you, with this simple mirror, all I see during the trip?
At this moment the mirror fell from his hands and broke into seven pieces.
Then the Master said:
- Now, with these seven pieces, you can build figures to illustrate your trip. "from here

Mr. Tan and the tile

"Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a Chinese gentleman named Tan. Mr. Tan lived in a golden palace, with a lake. He loved walk around the lake for hours ... One day while wandered among the reeds, he saw a bright object on the ground. He bent down and found a magnificent silver tile. He took it and admired it, the tile was smooth as the surface of the lake, soft as a feather, bright as his outfit.
Unfortunately, the beautiful tile escaped from his hands and broke into seven pieces on the floor! Mr. Tan, disappointed, tried to reconstitute it. Putting the pieces together, created a form, a little character!, shifted a few more pieces, and to his astonishment, formed a beautiful house!
Mr. Tan returned to the palace so excited to have invented a new game.
He called it TANGRAM and offered one to everyone in his kingdom!"

from here

All this stories share several things: the object geometry, a square tile or a square mirror; the object falls; the object split in seven pieces (Tans); someone try to reconstruct the square and various forms are formed.
As we said earlier, we found a quite a different story, so that caught my attention, the Legend of Yu and the God of Thunder.

Yu and God of Thunder

 "Thousands and thousands of years ago, Yu , the Great Dragon, lived among humans, who venerated him because he was 'yang', good, and was always ready to help them.

One day, the God of Thunder, jealous of the offerings the men had brought to Yu, in a burst of anger, crushed the sky with his hatchet. So, the sky fell on Earth in seven pieces black like coal. Light disappeared taking with it all existing things.

At first Yu felt sad for the world, and then felt nostalgic. So he decided to collect the seven black pieces of the sky and, in memory of the former world, began to reassemble several kinds of shapes: animals, plants and human beings that had disappeared. But after finishing each shape, its shadow left it and wandered the deserted world crying about its misfortune.

These complaints reached the ears of the God of Thunder who was touched and, to remedy the harm he had caused, he pulled from each shadow the body of a living being to repopulate the Earth.

From that time on, our shadow faithfully follows every move we make and with the seven pieces of the sky, called Qi Qiao Ban (literally 'seven boards of cunning'), everything on Earth can still be shaped".

from here

You can read more about Tangram here.

Sources:
http://www.archimedes-lab.org/tangramagicus/Tangram_legend.html
http://peixinhosnosotao.blogspot.com/2009/02/tangram-lenda.html
http://pt.scribd.com/doc/42133445/A-Lenda-Do-Tangram-1
http://www.eb1-setubal-n17-amoreiras.rcts.pt/projectos/fotostangram/a_lenda_do_tangram.htm

Et Voilá!
We found this story so wonderful and so restless that we couldn’t help sharing it
Enjoy!

Origami Constructions- Straight lines that seem to fold as a sheet of paper

Today we bring to you the result of a little research work on internet.
This were some of the images we found under the theme Origami Buildind.

1. Architecture Museum - Origami design Architects Rojkind

2. Origami design home Architects Yasuhiro Yamashita, Tokio

3. Residencial home,  Architects Andreas Trisveis, Larnaca - Cyprus

4. Homes and temporary housing, Aquitecto Ming Tang, China

References: imahnahome.com; jebole.com; arnewde.com

Et Voilá!
not madeof paper, but almost
Divirtam-se! 

Polyhedra with flexible straw

Some games are incredible amazing, they are so simple and obvious that they take us back to school playground.

Today we will play with simple materials, but we will do amazing stuff. Our little restless minds will be amazed with the fantastic effect, and they will not know how to spot doing it.

First of all,
Polyhedra are geometric solids limited by polygons, in other words, all polyhedra faces are plain, and these faces can have any number of edges (the triangle has three edges, the square has 4 ...).
In this activity we will build geometric solids with straws and tape, you will see they are stronge and stable.

We will need:

• flexible straws,
• tape.

How to:

1. Take 2 straws; 
2. Flexible straws have one short end and one long side, with your fingers press the short end, smash it, you must be able to squeeze it;
3. Take the squeezed end and snap it inside the longest end of the second straw;
4. Repeat the procedure with a third straw; 
5. Bend all three flexible ends at 60º, join the large and small ends of the first and third straw, and this will make a triangle;
6. Make 4 triangles;
7. Tape the triangles, side to side;
8. The last triangle is the base, now you have a pyramid, tape several different triangles in different positions and you will build other solids.
9. If instead of using three straws you use 4 you will make a square, with 6 squares you can make a cube;
10. If you use 5, it will become a  pentagon, a hexagon can be made with 6 .... and so on, the more you use the larger will be the structure;
11. You may want to do smaller solids...cut the straws ... if you do this cut them all the same size.

Et voilá!
Fun math with colorful straws


Enjoy!

Yet about Tangram- Paradox

Tangram paradoxes are designs that can be built with all the 7 pieces of the game but aparently are contradictory- click here to see the game rules, like the image above:

Fig1

In this image the man design is paradoxical, both designs used the 7 polygons as the rules, but the right one has feet, what makes us think that it used one more piece. But all the rules were respected! How this is possible?

This paradox was first idealized by Henryn Dudeney, and the solution is in the next figure:

Fig2

After observe the figure above we can conclude that this two images apparently the same, are in fact two different designs with the same area, since the missing feet are compensated by the larger body.. They have the same area because they both use the same polygons (7 tans).
Try to build these figures with your child, and you will see him/her thinking that’s magic.
Now that we understand this dynamic we can see other examples:

Click to expande

Et Voilá!

Fun with geometry

Enjoy!

Tangram- Craft

What is Tangram?
The Tangram, is one of the most popular puzzles in the world. This enigma is formed by 7 polygons and the goal is to organize all the pieces to form geometric figures.

This mathematic puzzle was, more then 100 years ago, so famous as the Rubik Cube, and it was played for many as entertainment, educational tool or mathematic tool. Tangram makes easier to recognize the geometrical forms by young children, and helps on mathematical problems resolution.
The seven polygons that form Tangram are called "tans" and they are organized like the picture

Tangram goal
The goal of this game is to place all the 7 polygons in the right position to form a given design. Sometimes there is more then one solution, alternatives solutions are acceptable as long as they have exactly the same design that is asked.

Basic rules:

• You must use all the 7 pieces;
• All the pieces must be plain;
• The pieces must touch each other;
• The pieces can't be overlapped;
• Pieces can be rotated and/or turned up side down to form the design.

The first challenge we face when we want to play this millenary game is the Tangram itself. Drawing it from scratch is a good option. you can make it the right size for you and chose the colors you like the most, that’s the first step "to make the game yours", and that’s very important in the learning process.

Today we are going to show you how to do this.

We will need:

1. 1 sheet of cardstock, EVA, cardboard or other material,
2. ruler,
3. square,
4. pencil,
5. eraser,
6. scissors.

This step by step is very simple, just try to be exact on the measures.

1- Use the scissors to cut a square shape:

2- Draw a straight line between B and H, dividing the square into two equal triangles: 

3- Find the exact middle of the line HB, name that point D: 

4- Now draw another line from vertice A to point D, at this time you must have three triangles.

5- Find the exactly middle between B and J, that will be the E point. Now do the same to the H and J, that will be the I point.

6- Now draw a line from E to I.

7- Draw a line that makes a 90º angle between point D and line IE , in other words elongate the line AD.

8- With the help of the ruler and the square draw 1 parallel line to DG and another parallel line to the line AH.

To personalize your Tangram puzzle, and create something really unic, paint it in your favorite color, or use a pattern, after painting cut all the polygons to have the 7 geometrical figures.

Images bellow were found on Internet, and are only a few of many possible images we can form using Tangram pieces.

Although the original form of Tangram is a square, there are other Tangram forms, like the egg and the round shape:

References: http://www.archimedes-lab.org/tangramagicus/pagetang1.html#; http://bloguinhovania.blogspot.com/2010/05/como-fazer-o-tangram-com-dobradura.html

Et voilá!

Fun with geometric forms

Enjoy!