Welcome from Dr. Yossi Elran

Welcome from Dr Yossi Elran

This course is our second flexagon course, so you are probably wondering what’s new in the course and whether it depends on the previous one. Although this is preferable, the two courses are independent and each takes a different approach. The first course, Flexagons and the math behind twisted paper, is a more basic and general course, with a lot of background material and recreational math tidbits along the way. For example, Möbius strips are discussed as well as magic squares. However, really only the basic flexagons are dealt with.

This course, in contrast, addresses flexagons, “bottom-up”, using a flexagon generating scheme invented by Scott Sherman. We will handle many more flexagons and many more flexes, take a better look at flexagon designs, use flexagons to create puzzles and give a birds-eye mathematical description of these magical paper objects.

Each week will have a theme, and we’ll learn about it through videos, articles and discussion. There will also be other optional tasks and exercises you can try to enhance your learning. Each week builds on the last, so we strongly recommend you work through each week in order. Each week should take you about 3 hours to complete if you do all the tasks. There are quizzes along the way to help you learn.

Using FutureLearn

If this is your first FutureLearn course, you may find it useful to watch this ‘how it works’ video guide. Even if you’re an old hand, you may still like to read this FutureLearn blog post which explains all the recent changes to the in-course navigation. We also recommend reading six tips and tools for social learning on FutureLearn to get the most out of the interactive and social learning features of this course.

Follow Yossi

To see Yossi’s comments in your activity feed or when using the ‘following’ filter in discussions, visit his FutureLearn profile and click “follow”.

You can also follow us on other social media, Facebook and Twitter, by using the hashtag #FLflexagonsgalore. In fact, you will be using social media quite extensively during the course to post images of your work, so please, don’t forget the Hashtag! When posting or sharing, make sure your posts are set to ‘public’, but please review your privacy settings to make sure you are only allowing access to what you want.

Get extra benefits, upgrade your course

You can now get extra benefits by upgrading this course, including:

Unlimited access to the course: Go at your own pace with unlimited access to the course for as long as it exists on FutureLearn.
Access to tests: Ensure you’ve mastered the material with access to tests on the course.
A Certificate of Achievement: To help you demonstrate your learning we’ll send you a Certificate of Achievement when you become eligible.

Find out more

Let’s get started

When you have watched the video, please “Mark as complete” below, and move on.