Concept Map

The concept map is one of the main methods to illustrate the progression that a student takes through the concept exercises.

Design Goals

  • Provide a meaningful concept map of ideas from simple to complex ideas.
  • Provide a pathway towards fluency in a language.
  • Illustrate the progression through the course contents.

Structure

  • Nodes
    • Each concept is represented by a node on the concept map.
    • Provide a quick reference with their style to indicate the degree of progression.
      • Mastered: Concepts whose learning exercise and all associate practice exercise is complete.
      • Complete: Concepts whose learning exercise is complete, but one or more practice exercise is not complete.
      • Available: Concepts whose learning exercise has not been completed.
      • Locked: Concepts whose learning exercise requires one or more pre-requisite exercise to be completed.
  • Paths
    • Provide a relation of one concept to the next.
    • Provide a relation indicating the building blocks of a concept back to the root.

Configuration

The configuration of the concept map is determined by details of the config.json associated to a track. Specifically the specification of the concept exercises determines the shape and layout of the concept map.

You can view the code used to compute the concept map specification on GitHub: Exercism/website: determine_concept_map_layout.rb

A concept exercise specifies its prerequites and also the concept it teaches on completion. If we translate this to the terms of a graph:

  • A concept represents a vertex (also known as a node)
  • A concept exercise determines one or more directed edges between two vertices (nodes)

It is important to note, not all edges that could be specified from the config.json appear in the result -- only the edges from the preceeding level are selected.

flowchart TD
    Basics --> Integers
    Integers --> Strings
    Basics --Edge Removed--> Strings

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