Mind Map Software Review – XMind
My daughter is a visual learner. She loves looking at maps, prefers looking at groupings of items for counting than flash cards, and takes hands-on art classes at every opportunity. When my wife teaches history with the kids, she does long timelines in the house, and with my daughter, she creates mind maps in a notebook.
What is a mind map? I like the wikipedia definition:
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
I decided to take it a step further and incorporate some technology with the mind map and see how she liked it. I owned xmind already, so thought we’d try it together for her science assignment on Wombats.
My one word review: Excellent.
Xmind has a very intuitive interface. I turned the controls over to my (now) 9 year old daughter and she got started right away. The interface starts you off with a topic in the middle of the screen. Adding sub-topics, and sub-sub-topics etc., is very easy.
The site integrates a browser inside the application, so you can perform text or image searches and easily move the text or image into your mind map. This was the highlight for my daughter, finding the pictures that she wanted to put in her project.
The tool has got deep functionality but that doesn’t get in the way of someone who wants to skim the surface of what it can do. When we finished, xmind gave us several ways to present the data: an image, a pdf, or, our favorite, as a slideshow moving from sub-topic to sub-topic. This project was everything you want a project to be, my daughter learned about her topic, she had to organize the information, she got comfortable with a tool that was not frustrating to her, and she enjoyed presenting the information to us because of the slideshow manner. We even emailed the image to grandparents for them to see as well.
I highly recommend this software for yourself or for your kids if you are, or have a visual learner.
Aqueduct Project
Last spring the kids studied the Roman Empire. I ‘suggested’ that a cool project for this lesson would be to build a Roman Aqueduct. Jenn said “that’s a great idea, good luck with that.” (The lesson, be careful about suggesting projects like this as ideas for someone else to implement.) 
So Will, James, Ruthie, and I dove in. I thought we would incorporate several lessons into this: Math (measurements), history (talking about Roman Aqueducts, which mountains they came from, what other civilizations had aqueducts), Latin, science (discussing what obstacles there would be to getting the water to flow), a little bit of shop class (cutting the PVC, connecting the pieces), and, later, the art of diplomacy (as we crossed deeper into the kitchen than we planned, a land we called Uz-MOMMY-stan).
We first determined where the aqueduct would go, from our upstairs shower down to our kitchen sink. I wanted to have my daughter involved, and she is a good artist, so she did the architectural drawing. We then did our measurements to figure out how much PVC pipe we were going to need. (Through all of this the kids were the project leaders, I offered guidance when needed but this was their project.) After trekking to the Home Depot we laid out our pieces and began making our cuts.
Each one of the kids took turns measuring, marking and cutting the PVC pipe. We ended up with a little over 50 feet of PVC pipe, several connector pieces, a funnel for the beginning and end, and lots of support beams. Unfortunately, I didn’t really think through how we’d support the PVC pipe, so as you’ll see in the following photos, we had to get creative (not necessarily a bad thing.) We improvised with ladders, rakes, blocks and anything else that gave us the slope we needed.
We worked on the top floor, tying the funnel to the shower spout. We had to work on the right slope in order to have it at a decent slope, not too fast or too slow. We also had the practical matter of making sure we could navigate up the stairs and across the upstairs hallway.
My oldest son takes Latin at a homeschool co-op, so we had him translate our signs into Latin.
As we moved into the kitchen, we realized we had to go further in than we had originally planned. So we made a game of it. The kitchen became Uz-MOMMY-stan, and we had to negotiate to encroach upon her borders. Jenn had fun with it and we had to make sure we compromised with her as Uz-MOMMY-stan was the country from which we imported our food.
When we were near completion, we tested with marbles first, then turned on the water. We had a couple leaks and worked that out with good old duct tape. This was an incredibly fun project, we learned a lot, made some good memories and it was a good way for me to get involved.
If you have done any fun projects, link back to it from your blog, or note it in the comments.