Origami: Paper Planes

Folding paper into planes is an old tradition in many countries.

This Demonstration shows how to fold paper to create several types of planes.

In the following we explain the controls:

Here you select which plane you want to build; an image of the completed plane is shown.

There are four additional buttons to make the selection easier: "<<", "<", ">", and ">>". By clicking the buttons you can skip to the first, previous, next, or last plane.

To start your paper folding, set the "step" control to "1".

There are four additional buttons to make step selection easier: "<<", "<", ">", and ">>". Click one to skip to the first, previous, next, or last folding step, respectively.

Move the "fold" slider to see the current folding step executed.

The finished plane will be displayed when the maximum number of steps is selected and the "fold" slider is moved to the rightmost position.

Use this control to select the color of the top side of the paper sheet.

Use this control to select the color of the bottom side of the paper sheet.

Use this slider to select the opacity of the paper.

Click this option to display a 10×10 grid of dots in the - plane.

A black dashed line indicates the next fold line.

A brown dashed line indicates an existing valley fold line in a flat paper section.

A blue dashed line indicates an existing mountain fold line in a flat paper section.

Some folds are only used as guidelines for further folds; hence not all fold lines are actually used as folds in the finished object.

Sometimes layered parts of the paper are displayed with a considerable gap in between; the reason is that in Mathematica the outline of the underlying piece is visible if the layers are too close to each other.

You can often improve or change the paper plane's flight type and quality by adding little flaps (called ailerons) at the rear edge of a plane.