[tehjoker]

It's true, it's a bit tricky, but it's an interesting idea. One could imagine a deployable carpet that consists of folded paper sandwiched between thin water impermeable layers to make a lightweight collapsible elevated floor. Maybe there could be other applications too.

That said, it may not be strong enough to hold the weight of an adult on one foot.

[palata]

I think that's my point: what that kid did is "just" put some books on different origami folds laying on the ground and measuring how much weight they could hold. It's nice that kids have an interest in science, but I don't think it helps them to make them believe they almost solved anything they can imagine (e.g. "building shelters for disaster relief").

At this age at school, I remember making all sorts of physics experiments. I don't think it would have been worth giving us a prize and publishing articles saying that "our work on the Newton's laws may someday lead to new insights about orbital mechanics". We dropped an object and measured the time it took to hit the ground, and checked that the physics formulas were predicting it pretty well. That's all.