Textbox 1: The recipe —Mario’s fettuccine—

Ingredients (4 servings)

Fettuccine 280g

Butter 200g

Bacon 200g

Milk 0.50 litres

Parmesan 40g

Strip the bacon and put it in the frying-pan along with the butter. Let the bacon cook until it turns golden brown; meanwhile, cook the fettuccine in about 3 litres of boiling salted water. Drain the fettuccine when it is al dente and put it in the frying-pan over a hot ring. Pour in the milk and the grated parmesan, frying and combining them, until the milk curdles and serve immediately.

Glossary

Fettuccine: a kind of noodles, about half a centimetre in width, usually made with eggs.

Al dente: indicates that the boiled pasta is no longer hard, but not yet soft like wet cement. Usually, it is sufficient to boil it according to the time indicated on its box but as a guide to deciding when the pasta is “al dente” you can use the following criteria: if it sticks to your teeth because it’s still hard, you need to boil it a bit longer; if it sticks to your teeth because it’s too soft (similar to cement) then you’ve boiled it for too long and need more fettuccine.

Textbox 2: A very short summary of mind maps

The mind map’s ancestor, the concept map, was created in the light of David P. Ausubel’s ideas of … learning. By transforming experiences into concepts and giving them meaning they no longer remain separate entities but arrange themselves into groups, or “maps”: this approach mirrors the way our brains learn.

A mind map is a sort of simplification of the concept map because it only allows hierarchical links: a mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks and other items all linked to a central idea. They have many different uses ranging from acting as a study aid to an organizational aid, to problem solving and decision making.