Jancy Radke, educational math teacher, finds a better solution to use patty paper to help students with geometry by learning with hands on activities.

Patty paper is known for its transparency and being able to copy one drawn object to another by simply moving the paper to somewhere else.

Patty paper helps students construct triangles during their lesson about triangle concurrency.

“The nice thing about it is, you can see through it and be able to trace things,” Radke said.

Students learned with side-angle-side. They were given two sides and an angle measurement. Students then had to follow the steps to be able to create their triangle on patty paper. Students then checked with their table group to see if their triangle matches with their other tablemates. If their triangle matched their tablemates and with people around them, they moved around the classroom to check with other classmates to make sure everyone was correct.

“They start to figure out okay, well these are the ones that doesn’t work, and this is why it doesn’t work, instead of memorizing something that I told them works or doesn’t work,” Radke said. “So it’s a little bit more to discover.”

Radke went to a conference and noticed a teacher there was using patty paper for learning hands on. She also found some different explorations the students could do with the patty paper to make learning a little easier to grasp onto.

“[I like using the patty paper because] it gives me a visual of like, how I know the triangles are congruent,” Ana Wilson, sophomore, said. “I like how it can tell your side-angle-side that it’s congruent to and match up with the person sitting across from me and see it through the patty paper.”

Despite thinking the patty paper works well, some students prefer using regular lecturing over hands on activities.

“I actually don’t like the patty paper since I learn better with the teacher making us memorize things,” Jarod Wage, sophomore said. “I do agree with [Radke’s statement] but I just learn better with her just teaching the lesson.”

Students are able to draw the triangle over the patty paper and control how the transaction translated. This included rotating or reflecting over a line to see where it ended up, helping the students have a visual where it should be placed.

“I feel like every teacher should have like hands on but also like Radke is a really good job of that like for geometry,” Wilson said. “I feel like that helps for me.”