About three years ago, my chair at Purchase College/State University of New York asked me to design and teach a general education mathematics course using origami. She was prompted by guest lectures I gave to her Number Theory class on the Dollar Bill Rosette. My initial response was negative. Most of the students in math gen ed are weak and scared. However, I changed my mind, put together a course that introduces, perhaps re-introduces, basic topics in geometry, trigonometry and algebra and gives peaks into advanced topics. As I tell my students: mathematics can be abstract, but here our fingers are doing the work: for example, creating a triangle that is congruent to another triangle or doing procedures to estimate thirds or 11ths.

The course has run successfully two times in-person and once as a remote class. Two books, Origami with Explanations and More Origami with Explanations were published and used in the remote course . For this very short talk, I show some models and, briefly, share experiences in teaching. Please see me for folding and more information about the course and books, suitable for college "general education" and for K-12.