idea deployment.de

These days I’m working on my prediploma and had to refurbish two semesters of maths. I printed and copied two lecture notes and made a plan on how to get that stuff in my head.

Skimming

Going through the whole script writing dependency record cards for every corollary, lemma and theorem. Those cards are plain records cards (title and details on the backside), additionally with dependencies to other cards on the rights border. A card now looks like this:

Additionally it’s possible to set flags on cards. For example: if there is an evidence to learn, mark the upper left corner black.

After skimming we produce a nice pile of cards. For a script of approx. 100 pages I used 90 cards.

Arranging the Tree

Alright, now we got our cards. We’re sitting in front of a cleared table and throw them onto it, one by another. Since our cards have various dependencies we should be getting a graph. Just to keep it simple we assume that we got a hierarchy and draw lines by exactly one dependency for each card (except the root(s), they have obviously none). Now we have a cluttered table:

Okay, that was a nice attempt. As said, there’s no point of arranging 90 cards on an average desk (If you have less, you might be fine with that). Apart from that there’s a nother problem: we can’t see the dependency / hierarchy lines. Ok, let’s go digital:

Mindmapping the lecture

There are some nice apps for OSX to create a mindmap. On that occasion I moved away from mindnode to freemind (I just had to rearrange nodes). Additionally freemind is java and thus available for other platforms. Neat!

After typing everything in (with some shortcuts at hand it’s not that painful) we print the whole map on three sheets:

That process takes some time. But with this outline we’re not only able to see the outline of the whole matter, in fact we can learn specifically by browsing through the nodes in depth-first-search.