Use of Origami in Mathematics Teaching: An Exemplary Activity

Students’ attitudes and motivations toward mathematics decrease as they intensively confront cognitive information along the process of mathematics teaching in general. One of the most important reasons for this is the lack of activities for affective and psychomotor domains in the mathematics teaching process. One way to overcome this problem is to include activities through which students can participate effectively in the teaching process. For example, activities performed using origami can be one of them in teaching the attainments covered by the field of geometry learning in mathematics curriculum. Therefore, this study was carried out to present an exemplary activity about how origami can be used when teaching mathematics in secondary schools and to identify preservice teacher opinions on this activity. The activity presented in this study was performed with 32 preservice elementary mathematics teachers attending the faculty of education at a university and taking the Mathematics Teaching with Origami course, and their opinions were taken afterwards. At the end of the application, the preservice teachers stated that such activities would have very positive contributions to students’ mathematics learning. In addition, the preservice teachers communicated and exchanged ideas with each other during the application. It is therefore recommended to use such activities in mathematics teaching.