Copyright 2020 The Author(s). Published by vgtu press

1. Creativity and mathematics
1.1. Creativity in general
Creativity is at the foundation of innovation which is one of the vital ingredients for our 
country’s development. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value 
(Robinson & Aronica, 2015, p. 118), and is further divided into two concepts – putting 
imagination to work (creativity) and putting new ideas into practice (innovation).
Ken Robinson was quoted as famously saying that “schools kill creativity” at the of-
ficial TED conference in 2006. He asserted that the school environment does not seem to 
favour the inculcation of creativity. This include the pedagogy applied by some teachers 
that do not only fail to enhance creativity, but make students uncreative, because they are 
not given a chance to express their creativity especially in a mathematics class. According 
to him (Robinson, 2006), we should also acknowledge multiple types of intelligence, and 
argued that the way we are educating our children should be examined, since creativity can 
be cultivated to produce creative students.
It is believed that creativity can be nurtured using the appropriate creative environment 
because interaction with the everyday creative environment is the most powerful possibil-
ity of nurturing creativity in individuals, especially in children (Mellou, 1996; Ayob et al., 
2011; Trawick-Smith, 2014). Nurturing creativity in school is possible through continuous 
enrichment of children’s environment, such as development of creative programs for cre-
ative thinking, and may be fostered across many content areas. Teachers may teach content 
and infuse thinking skills particularly creativity without much fuss. However, teachers need 
to be clear with the teaching objectives and learning outcomes. Additionally, the teachers 
need to identify the right type of learning activities that can be employed and participated 
by students (Costa, 2001, p. 246).