Arab Origami Center

OUR MISSION

We seek empowering teachers and facilitators in Egypt by using origami for developing formal and parallel education, in addition to promoting creative thinking skills. We also work on combining origami with different disciplines; coming up with creative artistic products that serve social values.

OUR VISION

Using origami as a tool in order to  contribute in creating proactive and critical-thinking citizens that find new and creative solutions for their daily lives.

OUR VALUES 

Inclusion 

Creativity 

Interdependence 

Fulfillment 

Ossama Helmy AKA "OzOz"  is the Founder of the Arab Origami Center.          Ossama is a theater performer and a storyteller and has been using origami in theater performances. Ossama joined many storytelling workshops and performances -using origami- that took place in Egypt, the Arab region, Europe, and Asia and he is a voice-over artist and a game designer as he is fond of mixing different mediums in all his work and experimenting. 

As the Arab Origami Center is working on multiple projects sometimes it could be running at the same time. We as a team are usually working on managing our time to follow and implement all our workshops. 

Therefore, we could easily manage that our team lead will commit to 2 to 4 hours weekly, in addition to our educational consultant from the organization "Alwan w Awtar" that we already worked on before on the creation of our methodology. 

Moreover, the accountant and the program coordinator will be working on this project to assure everything is implemented as planned. .

The Arab Origami Center developed an origami-based learning methodology that includes the usage of Origami in applying for educational, creative programs.

The problem that our methodology seeks to solve is the absence of good quality education provided in public schools in Egypt. 

children are lacking self-awareness and lacking good access to resourceful knowledge due to the lack of a good educational system which will result in a lack of leadership skills. 

Informal education isn't sufficient enough to prepare a leader that can face all challenges as needed. This problem doesn't seem to be a barrier because the system of formal, routine, and theoretical education has been partially ignoring the importance of developing and improving the application of individual creativity in real life where there are few opportunities for a limited number of individuals.

A good leader is able to lead projects, encourage initiatives, build a sense of common purpose, and empower others. Accordingly, leadership is an essential trait to develop at an early age.

Consequently, we need the inclusion of informal education such as engaging in various activities which improve social and soft skills, acceptance of conflicting opinions, the positive effect of diversity, and the active discussion between the teachers and the students to exchange opinions with each other. These forms of informal education will help to overcome today’s problems such as reducing the amount of bullying and the social anxiety level, feeling free to share your opinions with others, and last but not least, increasing creative and critical thinking and strengthening the soft skills of the individual. 

Therefore, informal education is complementary to the formal education system to build a complete personality in all scientific aspects as well as developed personal skills. 

1- problem in education  

• Curricula are based on theory only and are not updated.

• Education depends on memorization and indoctrination.

• Increase the number of students in the classroom.

• Lack of interactive educational process between the teacher and the student, as well as among the students with each other.

• Lack of self-confidence, freedom of expression, low level of creativity, and imagination.

2- Teachers' problems: 

• The teacher does not provide the appropriate stimuli for the student, which makes the class inactive.

• Not using teaching aids or activities to assist to transfer the information. 

• Not taking into consideration that there are individual differences among students.

• Not paying attention to the weak students and focusing on the responsive student only.

After working on Origami based projects for 20 years and through our accumulation of knowledge over the years, we merged origami as an artistic, educative medium with different approaches in our life. We are mainly concerned with how to use Origami for addressing social and developmental issues in our society. We use Origami in different ways with children, we emerge with different art forms such as theater, book writings, stop motion films, game design, décor, and Graffiti.

Origami is suitable for different types of learners and their individual differences: Origami can be adapted to suit everyone, taking into account individual differences such as differences in educational backgrounds, gender, age, and different identities. 

Inexpensive: Origami is considered one of the most inexpensive arts at all, as only paper of all kinds is used, such as colored paper, magazine paper,and newspaper paper. 

Suitable for teaching many subjects and topics: Origami can be adapted to facilitate different educational materials or to present and present different topics about arts, life education, and others...etc.

High interaction: Because origami is a type of play, it is by nature fun. It requires the full participant's focus with the facilitator to follow the instructions, so it maintains the learners' integration and interaction, which achieves a state of complete mental focus. This situation creates cooperation between learners and a complete integration of any barriers related to gender, religion, or identity.

One of our recent projects is “Story-gami - from to children '' based on our creative writing curriculum,  which was funded by Eunic. 

That project gave rise to different creative writing workshops which are based on the creative technique called “Story-gami”: Which is the combination of storytelling and origami. As one person reads the story guides him/her in making a piece of origami that goes along with the story, each fold or step in the origami process is directly related to an event within the story. An interactive way in origami that begins with a story to guide you through each fold and ends with a surprise origami figure that can jump, flap, or fly away.

During this project, we had the opportunity to develop kids' stories into 3 different outputs: stop-motion origami films, a theater show, and 2 children's Origami Books. We tested the effectiveness of this curriculum with kids of three different social segments:  how effective this curriculum is with 3 different socio segments kids: refugees, international school students, and children under risk and we do have expertise in dealing with this age range. And at the end of this project, children had a higher level of satisfaction and that’s due to their contribution and ownership of all their artistic outputs. 

In addition to their acquired new skills, they helped them to be more confident while presenting their projects to another group of children who were attending the final event.

Formative and summative research:

We often do pre and post-workshop feedback, a common form of evaluating training programs in terms of knowledge improvement of the participants.

It could be in sort of surveys and questionnaires to the participants of facilitators, trainers, or parents of the children in order to listen to their reflections, opinions, ideas, and suggestions to improve the quality of the content or the service provided. 

We are keen to know the opinions of children's parents because all our workshops are based on active learning principles and all activities are non-formal education interactions allowing all children the same opportunity to be heard, seen, and valued, which is very different from other activities or school teaching methods. That’s why it is important not to measure the impact of the content only, but the behavior and attitudes of kids before and after the workshops. 

Honestly, this is not easy to measure but we are keen to ask and listen to individuals' stories and insights that help us and boost our effectiveness. 

One of our remarkable stories is the “Story-Gami” project. We noticed how The children had complete ownership of the stories which led to an increase in their self-confidence, and how they present themselves to others in the final event.  Simply because they had a participatory and opinionated action in every production stage of the project.  

In addition to conducting interviews with the children to gather some insights about their favorite characters, memorable moments, and what works best with each target group. 

we also do have 4 curricula: diversity curricula, soft skills, creative writing, and Math. 

we experimented with the creative writing curricula and also the diversity. 

In order to continually improve our services, we implemented several training of trainers and facilitators to make sure of the quality delivered to our target audience and our beneficiaries after knowing the feedback of the participants. 

• This evidence will help us to have a continuous evaluation of our progress in our activities. which will help us to reach a larger number of facilitators and children through new partnerships and thus it will help us to sustain more as an organization And spread the reputation of our work. 

• How is our methodology accessible to all communities ? 

• How origami could be used with different topics and mediums (such as stop motion films, puppet theater)? 

• How Origami could be effective in education? (formal and non-formal education)

rt mediums.

We will use this evidence-based research as a reference while applying to funders and donors and while dealing with different educational institutions. One of our goals is to reach the Egyptian Ministry of Education which will require having a well-structured evidence-based for our methodology and curricula.

in addition, to working on our partnerships which will allow us to experiment more with our curricula and workshops on a larger scale of children. 

Short-term:

1. Testing our methodology and activities which will eventually help us to have quantitative and qualitative data. Which in result, will be useful in identifying weak and strong points of each curriculum and allow us to edit it for further upcoming projects. 

2. Implementing facilitation school in Alexandria which is the first time to be held.

Long-term :

1. Being part of the educational awareness leaders and calibers in Egypt through implementing side events, talks, podcast episodes which will be accessible to everyone, not only who are working on the project but all artists, educational practitioners, aiming to promote the usage of Origami in education and different art mediums.