Mind Mapping

My Son’s Brain at 13 Years Old

Yesterday, my Nanotechnology team members and I returned to NC State’s ASSIST Center after our week long retreat in the mountains. We spent the morning learning about Mind Mapping. Contrary to my initial thought, Mind Mapping has nothing to do with activities similar to the one conducted by Duke University on my son as he participated in a brain study which is illustrated in the picture above. Instead, Mind Mapping is a great way to illustrate complex ideas. Another way to visualize Mind Mapping is to think of the activity as creating diagrams and relationships to help simplify complicated or complex material.

Mind Mapping Example: Basic One Health Introduction

As we learned throughout the day, Mind Mapping is beneficial for individuals as a brainstorming or planning tool. Additionally, Mind Mapping helps teams bring together ideas to cultivate strategies and plans of action. After being introduced to the XMind software package, we individually spent time researching One Health and creating our own Mind Map of the topic. After a few hours, we came together within our teams and shared our respective Mind Maps in order to create a cohesive team Mind Map. The beauty of Mind Mapping is that there is no right or wrong way to create a Map assuming that the information entered is correct. One person may see the same topic or question from a linear perspective where as another might see the same subject from more of a spacial and graphically enhanced perspective. The process of creating a Mind Map individually at first allows all of a person’s ideas and creativity to flow onto their own blank canvas. Then when convening as a team, some compromise, cooperation, and teamwork is needed to bring multiple maps with varying perspectives into one overall Mind Map.

CLICK HERE for Assist’s new One Health website

Today, we picked up where we left off as a team researching One Health and beginning to develop cross-curricular lesson plans. The tasks assigned to us have been very open-ended which has been a good learning process. It is evident that there is a difference in how University researchers address problem solving where as us as school teachers are accustomed to spelling out directions step by step for our students – even in open-ended activities. The good news was that our team made tremendous progress and understanding today as to what is expected of us with clarification and a better grasp of the long-term assignment.

My team is tackling a larger overall lesson plan focusing on wearable nanotechnology that will benefit both humans and animals as part of One Health. We have decided that we will focus our research on monitoring physiological stress in Search and Rescue Teams for both rescuers and K-9’s. We each are addressing the topic from our respective academic disciplines which include business, science, and technology to capitalize on each team member’s strengths. The team went through a variety of ideation (brainstorming) activities by ourselves and as a group to help formulate our ideas, questions to be addressed, and plans going forward. Post-It Notes and dry erase boards are simple fantastic tools for such a process.

Brainstorming

In the afternoon, the entire Assist team came together to participate in hands on demonstrations of wearable sensors and technology being studied and developed at Assist. Researchers from NC State shared with us activities being studied including monitoring the electrical activity of the heart via electrocardiograms (ECG and EKG) in common everyday clothing, harvesting energy from the body through wearable devices, and the development of low powered sensors in such applications. All of which are aimed at improving health and quality of life under the One Health initiative..

Below is an audio clip from the discussion and demonstration of the low powered sensors.

CLICK HERE for a news article about similar Wearable Technology being developed at Assist.