Today's discussion was on brainstorming. Brainstormming is when you throw out a bunch of ideas without stopping to evaluate or "judge" them. Your not thinking about the finished product just yet, you're just going with the flow and trying to come up with as many ideas as possible.
We learned that a good way to brainstorm is to come up with a mind map. A mind map is a diagram that you can use to put together ideas relating to a topic or theme. It encourages brainstorming in that you're writing down all these thoughts your conjuring up in your mind that then enables you to sprout out more ideas. To help us better understand the concept, Jimmy gave us 20 minutes to come up with our own mind maps. I myself, have a lot of trouble getting started on projects because, oftentimes I don't even know where to begin. During the exercise I found that once I had a topic in mind and I wrote a few thoughts down, without stopping to analyze them, I was able to come with a lot more ideas in a shorter amount of time. Also, because I was writing them down in the mind map, I was able to see areas where I could expand those thoughts and therefore, the map turned out to be quite large - a huge pool of ideas. Its almost like a thesaurus, one word expands to the next, and so on, and so on.
Our homework assignment (which is really a mini competition) is to create a more elaborate and expanded mind map using the concept learned. Our creation is to be in color and we will be judged for extra credit to the winner.
THE RACE IS ON........
Hi Elizabeth! Ah, I do see your name on your blog! My bad!! I think we had a great exercise in class today. I find myself writing many things faster as I keep mind mapping. I cannot wait to see what your topic is for our homework assignment!
ReplyDeleteI agree the exercise in class was really helpful and interesting and I am excited to see what everyone comes up with for their maps!
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