What does it mean

to be creative?

What does this look

like in maths?

Development of creativity

• Big-C: eminent creativity • Little-c: everyday creativity• mini-c: novel and personally meaningful

interpretations of experiences, actions and events (Beghetto & Kaufman)

John Templeton Foundation

• Big questions• Exceptional talents• Creativity• Openness• Science and maths

Our challenge

• Design environments and tasks that will be appealing to young people who are (probably) already interested in maths in order to develop mini-c (and who knows, little-c and Big-C)

Product

Process

3 elements (Amabile)

• domain related • creativity relevant• task motivation

• resilience• persistence• usually associated with long periods of work

and reflection (Sternberg)

Encouraging mathematical creativity

Process

Conditions

What conditions do you associate with being creative?

How can we do this on-line?

Writing about creativity

• Ill structured open ended questions are helpful (Schoenfeld)

• Overcoming fixations - thinking outside the box (Krutetskii)

• Problem solving through creative application of knowledge/new approaches (Poincare)

• Interplay between problem posing and problem solving (Pollak)

• Finding new relationships (Haylock)

11.00 - 12.30

Workshop 1: Cross phase groups

12.30 - 13.30

Lunch

13.30 - 15.00

Workshop 2: Within phase groups

15.00 - 15.30

Final plenary: Dr Rachel Thomas PLUS

HandshakesA man and his partner invite five other couples to dinner. As they enter the house the hosts and their guests shake hands

with each other. Not all of them do, for various irrelevant reasons. However, naturally, no guest shakes hands with

his or her partner.

At dinner the host brings up the question of the handshakes. Going round the table and finding out how many hands he or she shook, he finds that he obtains 11 different answers.

How many hands did his partner shake?