Technology Mind Mapped

For the past few months I had been in a very difficult state of mind. Needed some way to vent a few creative thoughts and to share these with people and feel good about it.

So last month I started teaching a group of students JAVA (some thing that I have been using for the last 10 years, with my own thoughts accumulated over a period of time that I wanted to share with these students.) This course was targetted towards novice programmers with or without prior expertise with JAVA or any othe programming language.

The goals of the course were to enable the students to learn concepts, use them in excercises and real life scenarios and complete a project using Extreme Programming methodologies.

With so many JAVA Traning centers and so many run of the mill trainers, I wanted to add some value to the course to differntiate this course from the others. To make a difference and make it a intellectually satisfying experience for both the students and myself.

So I thought for this course I should introduce MindMapping to the students and also use it extensively in my lectures. This is a techniques that had been developed some time in the 60's and is very effective learning/ note taking technique.

I have been using this for the past couple of years and wanted to propogate this to the students to ensure that at the end of the course:

• The students will go back with the thrill of actually learning some thing new.

• The students will be able to use MindMapping as a tool for effective concept/thought documentation.

• Build their own mind maps for various java concepts, each on a single sheet for easy reference later in their career.

This is where I am planning to document my thoughts, experience MindMapping JAVA and also teaching MindMapping as an effective tool for programmers to remember concepts and recollect them in the right context.

Sarath.