Mind mapping tool

Selection and Challenge.

Mind mapping is one of the most powerful tools in anyone’s arsenal when it comes to remembering vast  quantities of information; it provides the user with their own personal tree of knowledge on a subject of  their choice. One of the ideas behind Mind Maps is Semantic Network Models (Collins & Quillian, 1969)  which says that everyone has their own personal spider’s web, connecting everything they know about  objects together, e.g. Red is connected to fire, blood, love. If one section of the networking models is  activated, the surrounding links are activated. Our own personal experiences shape these connections  and everybody’s semantic network models are different. Mind Mapping takes a certain subject and links  everything a person knows about this subject together. This provides a vast quantity of information on  one subject on a single page.

My team couldn’t choose the right useful information. It was also hard for us to find a logical link  between all the information collected.

Application.

Everyone processes information differently. For visual learners, mind maps can be a particularly  effective method for organizing and absorbing information. Mind mapping is a fun, visually arresting  way to help you memorize information, brainstorm ideas, and solve complex problems.

We wrote down the central topic we were exploring in the center of a whiteboard. Everybody tried to  express that idea as simply as possible, and we drew a circle around it. We brainstormed subtopics that  are closely related to your central topic—these were our main branches. We surrounded the central  idea with these subtopics, and drew lines connecting each subheading to our primary topic.Next, we  looked at each of the subtopics and surrounded them with related ideas, facts, and images. We  continued expanding each of those new topics as much as we could, filling up the entire board with  related ideas and topics. Once done, we reviewed the whole thing. Seeing the entire mind map laid out  inspired us to add even more branches.

Insight and approach.

Many people use mind maps to help them memorize information. Mind maps use colors, shapes, and  images to present concepts and data, providing context and visual cues for complex information. By  providing the brain with visual associations, mind maps helped us generate and store new information.  Concept mapping is a particularly effective method for inspiring creative, outside-the-box thinking. By  converting the board into a flowchart of branches and sub-branches, it encouraged us to view the  central concept from a thousand different angles, which in turn, inspired new ideas. A lot of people use  mind mapping tools to break down complex problems into their component parts in order to develop  solutions. Distilling the problem to its central image or main topic and then expanding outward makes it  easier to analyze the problem bit by bit and find solutions that respond to each component of the  problem.

