Yesterday I escaped the office for good behaviour and attended a course on ‘Effective Writing Skills’ in an attempt to help rid me of my long winded sentences that don’t always have the punctuation marks they should.

Anyway this course was at the rather groovy Intech Centre in Winchester (like Techniquest only less publicised). As part of the course we had 10 mins to play with the exhibits (whilst impatiently waiting for half term kids to get off them) and then had to draw a mind map of the experience (we drew a lot of mind maps … which I actually hadn’t done that much of for planning generally brainstorming .. but my sort of thought thing).
We later wrote this mind map up in what ever style we like to inform others of our experience. For my recipients I chose my wonderful blog readers…

I therefore give you my thoughts as copied from the work notebook.

" Today I had a course at Intech in Winchester, a science ‘hands-on’ centre. They had a great variety of experiements to try there. It was just like being a kid again. The best one visually was the vortex tube, which I had a go on. They were really well built, so kidproof.
The most surprising was something called ‘Stefan’s Hexagon’. It is a enclosed hexagon box with a heat source in the middle and panels of different materials around the edge. Whilst the metal plates were hot as expected, I didn’t expect the heatproof mat to be as hot as it was. They also had sound cones across the upper display space, much like the real ones found on the Kent Coast.
Whilst it was noisy with half term kids, they all seemed to be enjoying the learning. Hmm, might take the Brownies here so I can play some more."

I hasten to add here that Word has not done any green wiggly lines for long sentences on this post … so I must have learnt something!