Creativity break: How does creativity play a role in your everyday life? | Algebra 1 | Khan Academy

Creativity is really important for me as, like a future job. As a part of my future job, I would want to, um, do something that changes, and then I can use problem-solving skills constantly. Um, I feel like when I make animations or when I figure out how to explain something, I'm really like that. 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, um, really, I don't know, inspiring to me.

Mathematicals is an educational initiative that I co-founded with 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 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, you know, 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. [Music]