Read Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share for Free Online Page B

that, what could you then do with the paper? All of which led me to this project.

    This project will introduce you to the electronic origami concept—we’re going to keep it simple and build a box with an LED. If you’re creative with this idea, you could come up with faux tea lights for decoration, or even emergency lamps.
    You can use a regular piece of 8.5-by-11-inch letter paper trimmed down to a square: Fold one corner over diagonally to the opposite edge, and then cut or use a straight-edge to remove the excess section of paper. This results in a fairly large box (about 4-inch square), so once you master the fold and the circuit drawing, you may want to scale down to smaller sizes, which will actually help the circuit—shorter electrical paths means less loss of power to resistance. You may also want to play with different types of paper to see which hold the current lines better. More absorbent papers may require thicker lines.

MAKING YOUR LIGHT-UP BOX
    STEP 1: Build your box, based on the instructions in the illustration. Use a straightedge to get good creases on your folds.

     
    STEP 2: We have to identify where the path of the circuit lines are going to go, and this will take a little careful tracing. Take a pencil and draw a small dot at the center of the inside bottom of your box to identify where the LED is going to sit. Now choose one of the corner sides of the box where the battery will slip in. You’ll notice there’s a pocket of paper on either side. Insert the tip of your pencil about halfway from the top of the corner and rub it around a bit to make marks on both sides of the paper in the folded pocket.
     
    STEP 3: Now come the electronics! Carefully unfold just the corner side of the box where the marks are by lifting the adjacent top flaps and expanding the folded-over pockets at the corner. Where you slipped your pencil in, you should now see two distinct marks on either side of a fold—when folded, they face each other. These will be the contact points for either side of the battery.
     
    STEP 4: Use the CircuitWriter pen to trace out the two circuit lines. At each of the contact points on the corner, draw a pea-size circle of the conductive ink, and then draw a line down to the floor and in toward the center. At a spot just to the side of the center, make a good pea-size circle of circuit material to end your line. These will be your positive and negative “wires.” They should not cross each other, but otherwise the path from the corner battery contact to the floor, where the LED will connect, is up to you. Just keep it relatively short.
     
    STEP 5: Let the page dry (use a hair dryer or fan for quicker drying). Check the lines for continuity and fix any thin spots. Once the page is completely dry, you can do a test run: Hold the LED with its leads touching the contact points in the middle of the page, and then take your battery and carefully fold it into the crease between the other two contacts. Make sure you have your positive battery side feeding to your positive LED lead. If all is right, you should see light.
     
    STEP 6: To finish it off, fold your corner back together.
     
    STEP 7: Looking inside the box, you can see the circuits you traced. Take your LED and, using a little tape, affix it to the center of the box with one lead on each contact. Where the circuit lines vanish into the corner folds, slip your CR2032 battery into the fold, positive side to the positive contact, and negative to negative. To get the battery to fit well in the pocket, you may need to use an X-Acto knife to slit the paper along the adjacent fold so you can then slip the battery in from the outside, under the top flap. Then you can hold it in place with a paper clip.
    The LED will light up, and you have built your first piece of electronic origami!

    This is just the start, though. The variety of origami patterns available on the Internet is nearly limitless. You can fold a dragon and make a flaming mouth