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MindDraw is a visual thinking tool that enables you to construct, explore and share drawings of your ideas. It is available for free download from this site. MindDraw was developed by Theory Garden LLC to help learners of all ages think about a question or situation that is important to them, and create a drawing of how they see the elements and forces at work the situation. Drawing an idea is useful for clarifying your own thinking as well as for communicating your thoughts to others.
MindDraw can support free form thinking as well as more precise, theoretical and analytic thought processes. An example of freeform thinking is to use MindDraw to construct a concept map in which you draw links between the words in your idea. showing how they are associated.
We at Theory Garden™ developed MindDraw so that it could also help in a more precise form of visual thinking, in which you draw a theory model, which shows your idea about the elements (or forces) in a situation and the correlations among them. A theory image is your belief as to the important factors in a situation and how a change in one element causes or influences a change in another one. By drawing your understanding of the factors and correlations at work in a situation, you are better able to anticipate what will happen next, and why.
Finally, MindDraw can help you go beyond an understanding of the current situation and show the changes that you would like to make in the future, by drawing a design image. A design image is a theory model of an existing situation to which you have added your desires as to how the situation could be changed for the better.
Drawing is an important form of thinking, since you never really know what will be in your drawing, or what it will show you, until you have drawn it. Sharing drawings of ideas with others and discussing your ideas with them, is an equally important form of thinking made possible by MindDraw.
MindDraw also enables you to show your feelings about each element in an idea by using a color scheme and a customized legend of what each color means. It has features that help analyze complex ideas, showing cyclic patterns of relationships, and the paths of influence leading into or out of each element.
MindDraw has a brainstorming feature to help you in developing an idea, and all your work on a map is recorded so that you, or someone you share it with, can play it back, step by step, to review your thought process as follow your thinking as you drew it.
