Dot Mapping

Overview 

Dot Mapping is an exercise extracted from the Google Ventures (GV) Sprint process. Designed by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, the GV Sprint is used by companies and organisations around the globe to rapidly identify problems, prototype solutions, and test with stakeholders.

The Dot Mapping exercise, just one of the tools from the GV Sprint, facilitates students abilities to rapidly generate ideas and collectively decide on the priorities for moving forwards. It may be used in a variety of scenarios from designing learning experiences through to learning-by-doing workshops. The exercise may be used for small, medium, or large groups of students and takes little time to set up or run. The collective nature of the exercise further provides ownership over the direction of the students learning journey, thereby helping to improve students satisfaction.

The Dot Mapping exercise comprises of two parts.

Part One: Question Generation
Staff provide a problem or topic for exploration. Participants write down any questions they think are important to the given problem domain, one question per posit note. All participants questions are then stuck onto a wall for the rest of the cohort to view.

Part Two: Voting
Participants use dot stickers to vote on what they feel the most important questions are for the topic in question. Each participant is given a limited number of stickers to ensure a focused view of the issues at hand. If time permits, participants can use a different coloured sticker to vote on the least important questions for the topic. This will provide a list of questions to focus on, questions to come back to, and questions to forget about in relation to the task.

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