Supporting Creative Design Processes for the Support of Creative Mathematical Thinking Capitalising on Cultivating Synergies between Math Education and Environmental Education

摘要

Mathematical creativity is acknowledged as a backbone lifelong competence necessary to be fostered in all students. However, this is not an easy task to accomplish, due not only to a lack of appropriate technologies enabling the creative design of digital educational resources for creative mathematical thinking (CMT), but also to the absence of insightful methodologies to support creative design processes of this kind among professionals. The Mathematical Creativity Squared (MC2) project aims to address this twofold problem in the following ways: (a) by designing and developing a new genre of technological environment for the design of CMT resources, 'the c-book' environment, and (b) by adopting and further developing a methodology based on the generation of Communities of Interest (CoI) as a social milieu which will facilitate the creative design of CMT resources in collectives of educational designers stemming from diverse professional and educational domains. Especially with regards to the latter, the rationale is that CoIs will support synergies among designers with a math education background with others carrying a more socially-relevant educational orientation, such as environmental educators and educators for sustainable development, both on epistemological and pedagogical level, with the aim that their 'boundary crossing' interactions will positively effect social creativity in the design process for digital resources for CMT.