A post on Twitter (now X) grabbed my attention this week. It was a simple video of an Automatic paper airplane folding machine created by Ken Lego (Lego Technique Club, Osaka University, Japan). Osaka University LEGO Users Group (OULUG) is the only University-based LEGO Users Group in the world to be officially recognised by the LEGO group. Managed mostly by university students, the aim of this group is to have visitors enjoy science through LEGO.
I wasn’t alone in being amazed at this Lego Technics build. As of November 4th 2023 the video is week on it’s way to 900,000 views and has received over 6,000 likes. Perhaps the best signal of interest is that fact that over 800 people have bookmarked this on Twitter, which usually means they will want to review the post later and share with others.
This is version 3 of Ken Lego’s paper airplane system. Looking at the Ken Logo channel on YouTube you will this longer video of the Version 3 and earlier versions. It is very interesting to see how the design has been simplified with each version. Earlier versions remind me more of old LASER printers and photocopier mechanisms whereas version 3 is clearly inspired I would say by the minimalistic paper handling design of a modern budget inkjet printer.
Clearly the ability to feed a sheet of A4 photocopier paper into one side of this Lego Technics machine, have it folded and then launched automatically is very impressive.
From an educational perspective this project is probably only suitable in Higher Education (HE) as the number of skills, knowledge, time and patience required is so high. However I do think this would inspire younger children in secondary education to research and build simpler machines.
From an HE perspective, the refinement of this project from version 1, 2 and 3 could make an interesting research project.
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