Breaking the habit: engineering students’ understanding of mathematical creativity

ABSTRACT

In higher education, engineering students have to be prepared for their future jobs, with knowledge but also with several soft skills, among them creativity. In this paper, we present a study carried on with 128 engineering undergraduate students on their understanding of mathematical creativity. The students were in the first year of different engineering first degrees in a north-eastern Portuguese university and we analysed the content of their texts for the question ‘What do you understand by mathematical creativity?’. Data collection was done in the first semester of the academic years 2014/2015 and 2016/2017 in a Linear Algebra course. The results showed that ‘problem solving’ category had the majority of the references in 2014/2015, but not in the academic year 2016/2017 were ‘involving mathematics’ category had the majority. This exploratory study pointed out for ‘problem solving’ and ‘involving mathematics’ categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• mathematical creativity
• engineering
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paula Catarino is a researcher at CMAT (Center of Mathematics, Braga, Portugal) and CIDTFF (Research Centre on Didactics and Technology in the Education of Trainers, Aveiro, Portugal) and has been an associated professor at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) since 1985, in Vila Real, Portugal, where she teaches Linear Algebra. Her main research interests are related with several number sequences defined by recurrence, semigroups of transformations, Mathematics Education, as well as the Ethnomathematics research field. And now, she also studies the critical thinking and mathematical creativity research fields in its connections to the area of mathematics.

Maria M. Nascimento is a researcher at CIDTFF and has been a lecturer at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) since 1985, in Vila Real, Portugal, where she teaches Statistics and Operations Research. Her main research interests are related to teaching Statistics and its Attitudinal and Didactical issues, as well as the Ethnomathematics research field. Now, she is involved with the critical thinking research field in its connections to the statistical thinking.

Eva Morais has been a lecturer at University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro since 2000, where she teaches courses of Statistics and Experimental Design. She is a member at CMAT and her main research interests are related to the study of methods used to solve partial differential equations in financial pricing models and she is also interested in the critical thinking in higher education research field.

Helena Campos is a researcher at CIDTFF and has been a lecturer at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) since 1995, in Vila Real, Portugal, where she teaches Geometry and Didactics of Mathematics. Her main research interests are related to teaching Geometry and its Attitudinal and Didactical issues, as well as the several number sequences research field. Now, she studies the critical thinking and mathematical creativity research fields in its connections to the mathematical thinking.

Paulo Vasco is a researcher at CMAT and has been teaching at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) in Vila Real, Portugal, since 2001, where currently he is serving an assistant professor, teaching mainly Linear Algebra at different courses, including several of engineering. His main research interests are related with numerical semigroups, several number sequences defined by recurrence as well as Mathematics Education. Recently, he has started studying the critical thinking and creativity research fields and its connections to the area of mathematics.

ORCID

Paula Catarino http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6917-5093

Maria M. Nascimento http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3913-4845

Eva Morais http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3815-9821

Helena Campos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2767-0998

Paulo Vasco http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5460-4297

Notes

1. In the Bologna three cycles programme, these were students from the first year of the first cycle.

2. Built using the free software available at http://www.wordclouds.com/.

3. http://www.wordclouds.com/.

4. A degree of the first cycle at the same School of Science and Technology that leads the Engineering degrees, one-cycle as in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by the National Funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundaç ão de Ciência e Tecnologia – FCT) under the UID/CED/00194/2013 project and the Pest-UID/MAT/00013/2013 project.