Students have varying degrees of creativity and can develop their creative abilities in specific disciplines through various stimuli. Tracing the students' mathematical creativity is very important since creativity is not a gift for specific students; rather, all students have it. The participants of this study were 170 urban and rural middle school students in Greater Malang, Indonesia. This qualitative descriptive exploratory research revealed differences in middle school students' mathematical creative models in problem-solving activities which were then used empirically to classify differences in students' mathematical creative models and provide characteristics for each of their creative models. Data were collected from problem-solving activities and semi-structured interviews. Triangulation of sources and methods was used to obtain data validity. Data analysis wasperformed through fixed comparison analysis. This research created meaningful and reliable differences in students' mathematical creative models, including models of imitation, modification, combination, and creation. As a conclusion, this study revealed differences in students' creative models and recommended that further research develop other problem solving activities to promote students' creative models traceable on an ongoing basis to more varied problem themes.