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.     

A case analysis of semantic technologies for R&D intermediation information management

It is evident that companies and research centres can find a myriad of instruments to fund their R&D (Research & Development) activities. Due to the dynamics of the information management in these circumstances there is a need for intermediary businesses intervention. Consequently, intermediary companies are thus involved in a complex process that needs to be managed and controlled. Within this scenario an Information Technology (IT) platform, named RDi-Advise, was developed by EgeoIT using semantic technologies to support R&D process decisions. This case analysis describes the development and implementation of the platform including the lessons learned during the activity period.