Mathematical creativity's understanding in engineering students of a Portuguese university

Abstract

Among today's attributes required to engineers is creativity. From the creativity domain, this work focused in mathematical creativity, since we teach students in Mathematics courses. This paper presents the study of 61 students' understanding of mathematical creativity of four engineering degrees that were in first year of a northeastern Portuguese university and we analyzed their texts to an open question in a Google Drive Form: “What do you understand by mathematical creativity?” Data collection was done in the first semester of 2014/2015 in the Linear Algebra course. The content analysis of students' answers focused on their texts led to three main categories that were crossed with students' gender, age, degree, and their liking for Mathematics. The results showed that “problem solving” category had the majority of the references, and there were no differences between the proportions of the categories by gender, age or liking mathematics or even independency. This exploratory study leaves clues about the connection that needs to be made between mathematical creativity and solving problems, in order to foster it in Mathematics courses in engineering degrees.