Since 1983, a group of professors from the Department of Mathematical Methods of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who are concerned to awaken vocations for research and stimulate the scientific spirit in undergraduate students, have been developing an extracurricular project of Scientific Initiation that is based on the study through the formulation of mathematical models.
This activity is offered not only to students of Mathematics but also to students from other areas who use Mathematics as a basic tool and attend both to the informative aspect and the formative aspect of education because, because it is predominantly active, it transforms the student of a patient into agent of the inductive process.
Within the developed Project, mathematical models are used as a way to lead the students and acquire and / or deepen their activities while at the same time rebuilding for themselves all the stages of the creative process that ultimately lead to the development of Science.
This project also provides subsidies so that a similar active method can be applied, at least in part, in the regular undergraduate courses, aiming to improve the quality of Mathematics Teaching.
