What counts for being creative? A mathematically gifted student’s perspective

The goal of the case study presented in this paper was to examine a student's perspective on creative products in project-based learning. In this paper we dismantle, by means of the theory of shifts of attention, a two-month long sequence of events that preceded an unexpected invention made by a ninth-grade student: the student invented a new mathematical symbol, and valued this invention higher than his solution to a complex mathematical problem. INTRODUCTION This article is part of a series of reports, in progress, on the results of a research project " Open-ended problems in mathematics " (Palatnik, in progress). At the beginning of a yearly cycle of the project, a 9 th grade class of one of schools in Israel is exposed to a set of about 10 challenging problems. The students choose a particular problem to pursue and then work on it in teams of two or three for several weeks. The initial problem serves as a basis for follow-up inquiries, which last for additional 2-3 months. At the end, the teams present results of their work in front of their classmates and academic audience at the workshop organized at the Technion. The project is designed as a venue for fostering mathematical creativity through mathematical problem solving and problem posing () theory of shifts of attention is chosen as a theoretical lens for dismantling and explaining the appearance of the creative products produced by the students in the framework of the project (Palatnik & Koichu, submitted; in prep.)