Maths Team Contest (MTC): Collaborative problem-solving in mathematics education

Abstract

Designing and implementing meaningful collaborative classroom activities which help young students improve their teamwork and collaborative problem-solving skills from early phases in their education is crucial. Nonetheless, these types of activities are not so common in the mathematics courses of the first years of university degrees.In this talk we will describe a co-taught and co-evaluated collaborative problem-solving mathematical challenge called MTC (Maths Teams Contest) which has been organized for the last 4 years for all freshman students of the degree of Mathematics Engineering and Artificial Intelligence at Comillas Pontifical University as a joint activity between the “Algebra and Geometry” and “Mathematical Analysis and Vector Calculus” freshman courses.The activity, in which groups of students are asked to solve sets of mathematical problems of increasing difficulty in a given time to earn points using any means they need (books and class notes, scientific software, programming, web search, AI, etc.), is designed in a way that requires cooperation from all members of the team, who must self-organize their work and their strategy to approach the challenge. We will also present an online platform developed for the contest which allows the group of professors evaluating the activity to coordinate grading in real time of the solutions obtained by the students and to give them quick feedback during the contest.