Concept mapping in computer science education

Concept Map (CM) is a graphical tool for organizing and structuring knowledge by depicting concepts as nodes, and relationships between concepts as edges. It can be used as an effective tool for teaching, learning, and assessment in many flexible ways. Although widely researched and utilized in many other disciplines, the uses of CMs in Computer Science (CS) education have been relatively scarce. This paper describes how CMs are used in our computing courses. It discusses our experience using CMs in various experiments and provides suggestions on how CS educators may explore and experiment on incorporating this versatile and effective tool in their own classes.