**Abstract**

The students attending the Italian technical and vocational high schools have often a critical behavior towards the classes of Mathematics and Italian. They usually believe that these disciplines are sterile and marginal with respect to their main interests that rely on subjects characterizing their professional choice. We made some experiments intended to wake up the interest and reactivate the lost creativity in these two disciplines. We report on an interdisciplinary experience in the first-year class of a technical high school where we introduced a series of games in the classes of Mathematics and Italian, with the intent of stimulating creativity and empowering the students. In Maths, we applied the puzzle-based learning technique. In Italian, we used the creative writing technique. Despite the limited time devoted to this experience, the outcomes have been extremely positive.

**Keywords:** creative writing, creativity in mathematics, divergent thinking, gaming

### **1. Introduction**

From the very first days of high school attendance, especially in Technical Institutes or Vocational Institutes, many students often assume adverse attitudes to deal with Mathematics and Italian. This results in hostile behavior and lack of interest, sometimes originating from low self-esteem or negative experiences in the early school years. These attitudes are an obstacle to good performance and successful inclusion in the school curriculum from the very beginning. There are many misconceptions in the minds of students. Perhaps due to previous negative experiences or an uninspiring social context, On the one hand in mathematics, most of the students consider the discipline dry and boring. They associate it to mechanical aspects of the mere algebraic calculation, neglecting instead the creative potential. On the other hand, in Italian, many students seem convinced that they do not know how to write, they are very concerned about the form rather than the content, and often, in front of the requests of the teacher, they take a passive attitude, almost giving up.

In this chapter, we want to illustrate an interdisciplinary project carried out in a first-class of a Technical Institute. The objectives of the project were mainly to

overcome the misconceptions mentioned before and to highlight the creative and intuitive component of the two subjects by stimulating students to curiosity and study [1, 2].

According to psychologist Max Wertheimer [3], the key objective of school activity is to foster so-called "productive thinking" in students, i.e., to orient students to solve new and unusual problems in order to stimulate their intuition. Our aim was just this: to propose activities that can bring out the students' intuition in solving problems, the so-called insight of Köhler [4, 5], that is, to activate those cognitive mechanisms, those mental jumps that allow to solve situations never faced before or to face known problems in an original, more immediate and brilliant way.

In other words, we wanted to enhance and put in the foreground the productive aspect of thought, refraining from mechanically applying formulas, grammatical rules, or procedures that passively reproduce already known knowledge and would make the discipline devoid of real meaning.

As other objectives, functional to the main one, we set out to strengthen the observational and abstraction skills as well as to foster the critical thinking of the students. In addition, we tried to awaken divergent thinking to build new knowledge from the acquired experiences [6]. All these skills are often dormant in the students, now belonging to the digital generation, more and more accustomed to the passive use of electronic communication tools and little predisposed to direct interaction with the objects of the real world. Observation, the use of materials and objects, and their manipulation has been the main tool to trigger the process of intuition and creation. A concept supported many times by Emma Castelnuovo, which remains always relevant, is that "one thing that is very missing in school today is the hand-brain relationship" [7].

However, a positive aspect of the new generations of so-called "digital natives" is that learning does not develop in a sequential way, but rather in a reticular way, i.e., following different directions at the same time. From this point of view, we are faced with students who are more predisposed to deal with interdisciplinary topics and to conceive knowledge as a "unitary whole". They are naturally disposed towards carrying out tasks in groups or online, being able to deal with connections between multiple disciplines and knowledge [8]. These are very important skills at the base of social learning as intended in [9]. In this perspective, our experiment aimed to create links, similarities, and communion of methodologies between different disciplinary areas, the humanities-literary and the scientific-mathematical, trying to guide students towards the concept that both are linked by the common denominator of creativity and intuition.

The experience proposes a fruitful interaction between the two disciplines of mathematics and Italian, linked by the common thread of potential creativity. This is an essential aspect in learning the contents and customizing the tools of the two subjects. For this reason, we were inspired by the technique of puzzle-based learning and creative writing, leveraging on the playful component of the activities, using as much as possible materials taken from everyday life, and proposing to the student's role-playing games or engaging questions solvable through teamwork, according to the methodology of cooperative learning.

The center of the learning process becomes the student, with his characteristics and his specificities. The passive transmission of content is replaced by the proposal to the student of authentic and contextualized problems ("authentic and situated learning"). The student, together with her mates, is stimulated to find the solution and formalize it, activating a metacognitive process that also leads her to reflect on how

*Perspective Chapter: Teaching Intuition and Creativity - An Interdisciplinary and Playful… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.103144*

she arrived at the final result and to have a greater awareness of her own learning process. These are the key competencies of "Learning to learn", "Mathematical competence", "Communication in the mother tongue" specified in the Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of the EU, 2006 [10].

Students are presented with "complex, open-ended problems", i.e., situations that are challenging for the student, contain a dimension of challenge in relation to the knowledge and experience possessed, solicit the activation of resources, and lend themselves to different modes of solution [11, 12].

Even though we dedicated only a few hours to this experience, the effects were tangible both at a motivational level, affecting the students'self-esteem, and at an objective level, as could be verified in the school parallel tests carried out at the end of the school year in the two disciplines.

In the following we will briefly survey the concepts of puzzle-based learning and creative writing (Section 2), then we will present the details of the activities carried out in class in Mathematics and Italian (Section 3). A brief report on the results achieved will conclude the chapter.
