Xavier Gibbons spent the first four days of October travelling around the West of England for Schools of Tomorrow to train students on Thortspace. He rrports the results of the training sessions were very positive and encouraging, students seemed to have great fun with the software.

Thortspace is a piece of software that allows  three dimensional collaborative mind mapping. It is made available to our Fellowship schools to support the development of student-led research thanks to the generosity of the Edward Hoare Impact Fund.

Thortspace was praised by students and staff for its intuitive interface  across all six of the pilot schools. The students seemed to have a very easy time navigating the program and creating and linking content, even the students in their primary years picked up the software very easily and for some, even went ahead at times. This was true for students using iPad and Windows versions of the software.

The visuals of Thortspace were very well received at all schools, with students mentioning how cool the software looks and exclaiming “wow” at the various animations and transitions. The ability to customise the spheres and drag and drop spheres to link them to each other was also fascinating to students and the collaboration over the network was a lot of fun for them. Even the cloud saving feature interested students as it allowed them to work on spheres outside of school, and they  seemed to be eager to continue using the software.