As alluded to in my last free inquiry post, I am trying to learn different origami patterns through a variety of different mediums in order to assess which ones are best (both in general and for me specifically). This week, I will be reflecting on a tutorial I found on Youtube, “How To Make a Paper Jumping Frog – EASY Origami” by the channel PPO, which is one of the more popular origami tutorial channels on that site.

Notably, this tutorial had no verbal instruction, so I had to purely copy exactly what I saw in the tutorial. The pacing was good, but I found that if I got distracted for a moment or looked down to fold, I would get lost and have to skip back a few seconds. So, despite it being a 6 minute video, it ended up being closer to 8-10 minutes to get a finished product. Now that I have done this pattern once, I am confident I would be able to follow the whole video while folding without getting lost.

This particular medium, namely a video with no audio, fills an important niche as it requires the creator/teacher to slow down their process and make every fold very clear and obvious; this slower pace can be very helpful for newer learners or for anyone who benefits from having a bit more time to learn or complete tasks. Additionally, since it it purely visual, there is no issue with a language barrier for this video. Another more niche benefit is that anyone can slow down this video with the built-in “playback speed” function on Youtube without any real audio distortion – having to hear someone speak at 0.5x speed can be very uncomfortable at times for some people, so having no audio works well for slowed-down videos. With all that said, I believe having verbal instructions would have been nice for me personally so I would be able to look away from the screen without getting lost every time, but I will test that out next week.

Photo: “Wow! Look how cool this frog is! I bet the person that folded this frog is a really cool person!” by Scott Gordon, 2023