Sakura Star

At first I had no idea how to start this project. This would be much easier if we were able to use internet, then research would take a couple of seconds and I would be able to get to work in no time. I sat in my room for a couple minutes thinking about how to get started. I had no idea where to go, so I did what I always do. I asked my mom for help, and she told me that my grandma used to do origami and that I should ask her. I called her and she said that she doesn’t remember it anymore, but she has some books that should have it. For materials, I only used A4 paper and a pair of scissors.

The creating process was extremely difficult for me because the books my grandma had were really old and damaged. And after looking through a couple of books I found that only one of the actually has instructions on how to make a sakura star. At the start I found the chapter that gave instructions on how to make it, then I noticed that this is going to be a long project and it’s going to be much more difficult than I first thought. Also, as I was looking through the book I noticed that some pictures and text were extremely damaged, my grandma and I could not figure out what we are supposed to do in that step. An initial look through made me really not excited for this project. But my grandma and I got right into it. We were supposed to start with a square piece of paper but we only had normal A4 paper. My grandma showed me a cool trick, with one fold and a quick cut she turned a rectangle into a perfect square. We got a good start, but very quickly the moves got more complex and the text was hard to understand. After a couple of failed tries, we decided to quit. We looked for other resources at my grandma’s house, but we had no luck. We ended up with something that kind off looks like a star. I’m not proud of my work, but I think I did a good job with the sources that I had.

This project would be trivial if I could use the internet to research how to do it, furthermore, a video would be much better for this purpose than a book. Videos are much easier to follow when doing crafts. Also, I had a big problem with my source being damaged and I had trouble accessing it. Furthermore, I was unable to get any other resources to help me because my grandma had only one book for it. Today we don’t have to worry about it because we have internet and all the information I needed for this project was a 5-second google search away. Also, on the internet, there are more and better quality sources, so if I don’t like one source I can find a new one in a matter of seconds.

My grandma and I had completely different ideas of what the tutorial was supposed to say. My grandma is an older lady who made a ton of crafts in the past, and I am a freshman in college majoring in computer science. Our backgrounds were much different and it was really interesting to see how our guesses were different.My grandma is not a big fan of technology. My grandma does not have any education or experience with technology because she doesn’t think it’s useful. But she really enjoys her phone because it allows her to call the rest of my family. My grandma’s situation reminds me of the reading we went over in class about digital divides. One of the divides was education, and the example of it was that some Mexican kids enjoyed playing video games but they didn’t want to learn about computers because they didn’t think it was useful. I think those situations are really similar because both the kids and my grandma used technology for enjoyment but didn’t want to learn more about it.