Students’ International Competition (SIC), was a “Gate2Math” Erasmus+ project programmed activity. As its name states, SIC was a competition whose main objectives were to raise students’ motivation, support student short mobility exchanges and help to understand relations between mathematics, logic, critical and creative thinking.

SIC promoted an open communication and investigation space over math knowledge and skills, where students were stimulated to share their thinking with peers and to look at distinct problem-solving strategies, working in different and unfamiliar international groups.

This work will describe all the SIC development and implementation stages, in a detailed and transferable way, as this experience can easily be reproduced in distinct settings and with different subjects.

In a very simplistic way, SIC had two main phases:
- SIC National Selection – during which participating countries selected their student representatives
- SIC Final – where students from the participant countries had four days of in person competition framed in one week of international mobility;

In the SIC final, while working in small groups, students were encouraged to share ideas, develop leadership, solve problems and manage conflicts in a multicultural environment, a scenario they will face in their future careers.

The feedback results from participant students and enrolled partners in the SIC will be presented, revealing several important results as, for instance, the improvement of multicultural communication skills through teamwork and collaboration, realizing several real-world connections with Math and increase logical, abstract and critical thinking and the capability to reflect critically upon their work and the work of others, among others.

Hope that this successful endeavor will inspire the creation of similar activities that may foster the development of soft skills, essential in today’s job market, yet often underemphasized in traditional higher education settings.

Keywords: Problem-solving, Erasmus+, Critical thinking, Student mobility, Interdisciplinary learning, Multicultural teams, Soft skills development.