Creativity break: How does creativity play a role in your everyday life?
About this video
Three people describe how creativity shows up in their maths-related work. One loves finding different ways to explain ideas and make animations, one co-founded an initiative making maths fun and accessible for girls, and one designs game-based assessments in data science by borrowing models from many fields.
You'll be able to
- describe how creativity is used in maths and data science work.
- explain why there can be many different solutions to the same problem.
Key words
- Creativity
- Coming up with new ideas or new ways to solve or explain something.
- Data science
- Using data and mathematical models to understand things, such as how people learn.
- Game-based assessment
- Testing what people know or how they think through a game instead of a regular test.
Transcript
(upbeat music) - Creativity is really important for me as like a future job, as a part of my future job I would want to do something that changes and then I can use problem solving skills constantly. I feel like when I make animations or when I figure out how to explain something, I love that because there's so many different solutions, but knowing that you can try to find and experiment with different ones and maybe create something beautiful is really, I don't know, inspiring to me.
- Mathematicals educational initiative that I co-founded with a fellow mathematician, Jess Williams. And what we're trying to do is make maths fun and accessible and encourage more girls to pursue careers in maths. So creativity is essential here because we're trying to think of ways that people will enjoy maths and it will be fun and accessible to them.
So different creative techniques that we've been using are trying to present mathematical problems in fun, short videos, and that explain the problem in a way that everybody will understand and will make them want to learn more and discover more about the topics that we're talking about.
- I'm really lucky that I get to be creative every day in my work and I have been since I got into this field of data science. So in general, across the last decade, my work has really been about designing and testing innovative ways to capture human behavior within game-based assessments.
So my collaborators and I, from the time I was in graduate school to now, use a variety of different modeling techniques from various fields, we'll pull things from engineering, aerospace, more basic mathematical models to help us achieve this goal. We get to think outside the box.
We get to think about how we can pull in different types of thinking from different fields to help us better understand human behavior, human cognition, learning. So it's really exciting and really novel. And it's something that because of the field that I'm in I've been able to do this now for multiple years.
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