The magic marker

Last month I went back to school for one afternoon. To my daughter Annika's school to be precise, because it was "wisseldag". This means that parents and children can swap seats. For an entire day, or just a few courses. Annika is a first grader and we agreed that I would take her place in Philosophy and in Science. Annika accompanied my wife to her work that afternoon. Not all children swapped seats, so there were both parents and children in the class.

It was a lot of fun to be back in school for a while. In the early 90s I studied to become a math (and computer science) teacher, so I immediately felt at home there. I don't expect to ever teach in high school, but if I do, it will be at Annika's beautiful school. Not sure whether Annika would agree to that particular career change though...

So last month I was a student, not a teacher. I had to take Annika's place: Participate in class, make assignments, ask questions, discuss with the children and parents at my table and make meticulous notes in her notebook.

And I really liked the latter. During the first hour of Philosophy I quickly understood Annika's mode regarding her magic markers. She uses blue for chapters, green for paragraphs, orange for important words and yellow for assignments. But the next hour in Science it was different: There she used green for important words but she also used pink in this course, for experiments.

This use of magic markers looked astonishingly familiar to me...

The workbench is part of the Be Informed platform. It's the product where our work usually begins, especially in large projects: upload relevant laws, regulations, policies and other formal sources, read them carefully and start annotating...

With magic markers!

The colors in the workbench all have meaning. And similar to Annika's different use of colors in different courses, the workbench also has different use of colors in different structured languages.

When a norm engineer is hunting for Terms and concepts, the workbench uses another structured language (~metamodel) and therefore another set of colors then when you are looking for Acts, Duties and Facts, or for Scenarios and Personas.

My daughter uses the magic markers wisely, I say this as a proud dad of course. And as a proud employee of Be Informed I say: Also a good choice in the Workbench.