Mind Mapping

Challenge     I am a high schooler and love joining hackathons. In the first hackathon I joined, our  challenge was providing a better understanding of how extinction happens because of  human activities or natural occurring elements. Then, launching it to the juri. Our product  consisted of many endangered animals’ data visualized on a map along with natural events.  Yet there were a lot of endangered animals and aspects that we were interested to work on  so we can clearly see that we had a lot of “what is”. In hackathons, your time and team  members are limited so you need to be very very productive to finish it on time. The  situation led us to ask “who will we produce for?” and the answers were researchers and  university databases.     Selection     Our team was sure of it that we had to select the most coveted or required data. Then  decided to collect comments made by scientists and universities on biodiversity  applications/websites. A few people in the team collected the requests by possible  customers. In short, we had a large amount of input and chose some of these inputs with  help of the customers, exactly the definition of mind mapping.     Application     As first thing, we copied all inputs made by the mentioned people on our white board. One  side being endangered animals and the other side being natural events. Then the team  wanted to see if there was a pattern so we linked who would like to see what animal with  which event, where and for what purpose. Then our team linked every question, the links  were at the amount that we could produce it with given deadline and number of members.  Next, we asked a few respective people to check if links were utilizable. With that being, our  final research appeared. Then we made research plan for every person, and divided white  board to areas. Every area included the questions; 1)Team member responsible, 2)What  question will I explore, 3)Who is my customer? Every person carefully filled it, the group  discussed each other's outputs and finished the process.     Insight and Approach     Using mind mapping, made our job way more easier, planned and creative. By applying mind  mapping, our team identified the problem, customer and patterns. Our approach to the  problem evolved to see what customers would like to see. Also learned how to handle large  inputs without clear links. We became more collaborative with each other and who we did  this product for. In the beginning everybody was concerned about adequateness. But after  filling the white board with post-its and arrows everything became clearer. It was the first  time we have collaborated to effectuate a product, and of course mind mapping was the  first tool. It served the purpose. In our future approaches, I would love to try learning launch,  even hackathons are not the right place to do it since we can try to launch it once. In a long  term workflow, this project would do great things with learning launch tool. In that,

launching is something we can have feedback on, the only feedback we got was from the  juri, so we can fix links or even make them more elaborative.     I discovered starting with a clear path is a great way to do so, next time I will collaborate  with this clear path with a learning launch tool. Then with given feedback our team can serve  with fulfilled opportunities.

