Teaching Kids Origami

Yesterday I spent an hour teaching origami at “Japan Day” for my son’s first grade class. It was frenetic. I’ve done this sort of thing before and it’s always the same.

It’s very popular. Kids love origami.

Most aren’t very good at it naturally. Being able to visualize and understand most origami folds is a rare trait.

But yet, there are always a couple who do quite well.

The kids are enormously demanding. No matter how hard I try to keep them on the same step they all want individual help and they want it now.

Then finally there are a couple who decided to open one of the advanced books lying around and start folding an eagle. It’s hard to convince them that they need to master the basics first.

By the end I had given out almost all of my “complex” origami examples to assuage the kids I couldn’t spend enough time with. There were misshapen star boxes and deformed cranes everywhere.

Of course, as I am in the middle of writing specs right now I can’t help but be reminded of my day job. Everyone wants something different from the spec and every audience has different levels of expertise and different concerns to be addressed. And everyone wants to be heard.

The only way to get through this process is engage and give them what they want. In the past I would sometimes push back and try to dictate what would be a proper question for a spec and what should be expected knowledge about file systems, IPv6, Windows architecture, or whatever. But that was a mistake. You end up with more bugs and a distrustful team. It takes a lot less energy to just keep pounding through the questions and shovel information to each audience as fast as you can. Eventually they will be sated and the team will be better off for the work. Everyone feels like they’ve been heard and you have a spec that will save a lot of heart-ache in the long run.