Presentation Structure
Overview of the topic (Quinn): Talk about origami, Turing completeness, cellular automata (maybe?), and the paper that we’re basing this on. Explain mountain and valley folds, and any other relevant origami instructions. Then introduce & explain activity. (~3 mins)
Embodied Activity: Students will count off into pairs. Each group will get print outs for a single simple gate (a few groups get OR, a few get AND). In the last few minutes, people will connect their gates together to form a half adder, and see how that will allow for the (theoretical) creation of full circuits. (~15 mins)
Wrap-up (Eve): Conclusion. Talk about how many computational options there are beyond digital circuits (i.e., mechanical computation), the surprising power of things like Origami that don’t traditionally seem like computational devices. (~2 mins)
Materials
I will print and cut out all of the origami gate templates needed for the activity. No other materials should be necessary besides potential visual aids for the overview and explanation (perhaps use whiteboard).
Sources
For the development of our case study, we used these sources:
Main paper we referenced:
https://pi.math.cornell.edu/~zakh/crease-patterns.pdf
Printout:
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/media/refs/paper_logic.png
Example of an OR gate:
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/paper_logic.html
More in depth paper about paper gates and Turing completeness
https://arxiv.org/html/2406.08490v2#S3.F9
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352431621000080
Video with example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvtUWq2N7Fg