Scheme of Work Tube Map: How and Why

The Idea

This idea came to me completely out of the blue, actually that's a lie, this idea just came to me in the strangest of ways. I was certain that loads of people had done it before me and that I'd seen a load of SoW tube maps on Twitter and favourited them. Turns out I was wrong, it would appear I possibly dreamt that and that I'd actually had a good idea (that doesn't happen very often).

So having decided this was actually a good idea and not something that I could find a previous example of, I set about trying to work out how to do it. This was actually easier than I thought.

The Method

I went through the various word processing variations on my laptop and desktop and eventually settled on Open Office draw, purely for the fact that it had preset rounded lines, thick edged circles and easy to use curve drawing. This made my task infinitely easier. I also downloaded the London tube map font here.

The easiest way to start this was to get out the syllabus for the subject I was trying to visualise (Protestant and Catholic reformation) and just scribble out a rough design on paper.
It ended up something like this:

As you can see, its a mess, with lines going everywhere and scribblings out. It really doesn't matter to start with, its trying to visualise the links that's important. As I was focussing purely on the two reformations I also split my original design into two colours: purple for the Protestant reformation, and pink for the Catholic reformation. This is however fairly different to my finished product.

Now I had a vague idea of where I was going with this I was able to choose the various 'tube lines' and assign them colours, I finished with 4 lines; Calvin, Luther, reforms and attempted reforms, these are just what came naturally to this subject, obviously you can have as many or as few as you want.

I began on open office using the  thick edged circles for stations and plotting out what I had sketched above. Where two lines met I used the underground style of two circles with a line between them. I achieved this by adding a thin box between the two circles and then blanking out the ends where it met the circles using small white boxes. The main difference between the original sketch and the finished product is that I decided to place them chronologically. Consequently, the Jesuits and the pre-Council of Trent seen in the bottom left of the sketch moved to the bottom middle in the finished piece.

Using the London underground font mentioned above I added the station names and linked them with rounded lines sized 0.2cm wide. The curves were added in using the fixed curve tool.

Having transferred all the data across I added a key and a title (very important to remember!) and added two 'zones'. Zone 1 being the Protestant reformation and Zone 2 being the Catholic reformation. This is a really helpful addition for students as it allows them to see links across the subjects, essential for exam answers, but also to keep the facts on the correct 'side'.

The Result

The finished result looked like this:

As you can see, you get a fairly professional result from a simple, free programme.

Why I did this

The benefits of this map should be huge. Obviously its the summer holidays so it has yet to be tried out on students but the overwhelming response on Twitter and Facebook has been brill.

The whole aim of the tube map is to give the students a visual representation of where we are going as a class. When we move on to a new subject they can see which reformation we're looking at, and how it links to all we've done and will do, they can also see where we are in the timeline that runs left to right. Although there are limited dates it lets them fit each person in order in their heads and know how things progressed separately and simultaneously. It has the potential for huge benefits in the classroom and I really hope you try it out!