Tutorial: Virtual Canyon Activities
Please note: This tutorial (and the activities it refers to) are primarily intended for participants of the Virtual Canyon project. If you are not a Virtual Canyon participant, these activities may still be relevant to you if you are studying Marine Science. If you are not studying Marine Science, you should try them anyway. If you would like custom activities built into LifeMap for your project, please let us know.
Choose "New LifeMap File" from the "File" menu. You will see the window shown below.
Figure 39: Save dialog box
Enter a name for your file and click "Save".
Select "Open Virtual Canyon Teacher Activity" from the "Special" menu. This tutorial will only step through this one activity. The others are very similar.
Figure 40: Special menu
You will see the following window. It gives you a very short introduction to concept mapping. Click "Go to Teacher Activity Worksheet".
Figure 41: Virtual Canyon Activity Sheet Instructions
You will see a form for entering concepts like the one below. In this tutorial, we have intentionally used non-Marine Science concepts as examples. You should enter concepts which have to do with Marine Science. Once you have entered your concepts, click "Create Initial Concepts".
Figure 42: Virtual Canyon Teacher Worksheet
You will now see the information below. Once you have read it, click in the close box in the upper left hand corner of the window.
Figure 43: More Virtual Canyon Activity Instructions
Now you are ready to finish your concept map. First, you will need to create some linking words. Your map currently looks like the figure below.
Figure 44: VC Worksheet Output
Think about which concept is most important and put that at the top of the map. To move concepts around, just click once on the concept and drag it to where you want it. Since tutorial is about trees, we'll put that concept at the top.
The next figure shows how the concepts have been rearranged.
Figure 45: VC Output rearranged
Now you need to create some linking words. Linking words consist of a word or a short phrase which describes the relationship between two concepts. For this tutorial, you should now choose "Create Multiple Concepts" from the "Concepts" menu. (There are other ways to create your linkwords. You can try the general tutorial to see some of these.)
Figure 46: MultiConceptMaker window
Make sure that the bottom radio button reads "Make Basic LinkWords". If it doesn't, click it and it will. Once you have entered in your link words, click "Create Multiple Concepts". Your map will then look like the following.
Figure 47: VC Worksheet output with Linking Words
Rearrange the link words so that the map looks like the figure below.
Figure 48: VC worksheet output with linking words rearranged
Now it is time to link up your concepts and link words. Start by selecting a concept. To do this, just click once on it so that it looks like this.
Figure 49: A concept selected
Now select "Create a Link" from the "Links" menu. Double click on the concept you want the link to go to. When you do this, it will look like the following.
Figure 50: Two concepts with one link
Repeat the link creation process until the map looks like the following. (There are several other ways to create links, but just do it this way for now.)
Figure 51: VC output with links
If you want to stop now, you can. You have a complete concept map. If you want to put your map into the classic style, you need to cut the arrowheads for all links that end in a linking word. To do this, select just the arrowhead, and then choose "Cut" from the "Edit" menu. When you do this your map will look like this. (You will get a dialog box for each arrowhead asking if you want to get rid of the arrowhead permenantly or temporarily. If you choose Temporarily, the arrowhead will reappear the next time the link is redrawn.)
Figure 52: VC output with links and some arrowheads removed
Now you are done. Unless you want to add more concepts, linking words, and links.
One last note while we are here. You will notice that in this tutorial you created two linking words between "Trees" and "Rain". We had you do this to illustrate two ideas. First, there are almost always more than one way to link any two concepts. The linking word you choose depends upon what you are trying to communicate. Second, not all propositions form grammatically correct sentences. ("Proposition" is the term we use to describe the basic unit of a concept map: two concepts connected by a linking word.) For instance, we could have created the following.
Figure 53: Extended Proposition
This makes sense as a sentence, but it is not necessarily the best choice for a concept map because the second proposition in the chain,
Figure 54: Dangling Dependent Proposition
does not make sense standing on its own. Also, "Grow" is a verb, and concepts are usually nouns or noun phrases.
The bottom line is that you need to be creative when building concept maps. You may be able to get all of your ideas into one big map, but you may also need to create several linked maps.
Okay, now that you have done the tutorial, please go back and do a concept map on Marine Science. You can email this map to Robert Abrams at bob@robertabrams.net, and you can call 212-369-6323 if you have questions.