CSC 313 Concept mapping

This activity is meant to help you summarise and connect everything you’ve learned this quarter. We’ll do this through the use of concept mapping.

Motivation

Since this class doesn’t have a final exam, and your final project focuses specifically on designing and teaching a workshop, this activity is a chance to step back and see the bigger picture as a connected whole rather than a series of weekly topics.

Our goal is to identify:

• topics that you found particularly interesting or important,
• connections between topics that may not have been immediately obvious, e.g., between use of generative AI and the pedagogical programming languages we studied last week
• topics that you wish we had studied or studied in more depth,
• topics that you think will influence you in the future; even if you don’t become a teacher, you will likely play some kind of mentoring role no matter what your professional role ends up being

Core task

With the people at your table, create a concept map about the class topics we have covered this quarter. Some resources to help you along are:

• The course schedule and Canvas
• Your own experiences shadowing tutors, teaching, and designing instructional materials this quarter

You can use any of the following tools to create the map:

• pencil and paper
• post-it notes and whiteboard markers (let me know and I will bring you post-it notes from the mailroom)
• https://www.mindmup.com/ 
• https://draw.io
• https://www.mindmaps.app/
• mermaid.js has a pretty simple syntax, and renders natively in markdown files opened in VSCode

Basic requirements/suggestions

• I recommend starting with a central node called Computing education or Teaching computing and start branching outward from there.
• Use the course schedule as a reference if needed.
• Don’t repeat node labels.
• Aim to have at least 12 nodes, and try to include topics from at least 5 weeks. But feel free to expand beyond that as well!
• Annotate edges if you’d like to give context to a connection between nodes.
• If you’re including a topic that we haven’t talked about, or that you wish we had talked about more, indicate that in the node.

Deliverable

Submit your map as an image. If you worked on pen and paper, take a picture and submit that. If you worked in an online tool, export the map as an image.

Please also add all group members’ names to the Canvas submission.

After you’ve created and submitted your concept map, be prepared to discuss it with the class.