The Catena Contest continues for one last day and so far there are 18 participants competing for 12 prizes. There’s still place for 82 more participants until the contest ends on August, 18. Feel free to [join](https://steemit.com/contest/@vitkolesnik/the-first-international-catena-game-contest-have-fun-develop-your-mind-win-prizes-get-visible)! 

## Game Tricks: Concept Mapping

In this post I’ll share a few tips on how to create good catenas quickly. The key to success in this game is the ability to [connect seemingly unconnected things](https://steemit.com/creativity/@vitkolesnik/creative-thinking-with-random-stimulus-quickly-find-new-ideas-and-develop-creativity-in-the-process). You can use a simple tool called *concept mapping* to discover these connections. 

Let’s take two unconnected words, **horse** and **cube**, and build some catenas with them. 

First, let’s make a quick concept map of associations with each word:

![catena-horse.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmTpxT5XTPMw5FAcTSwBewpvc6cHCot1R41KgNn8uaJWJG/catena-horse.png)

![cube-1.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmR67cAY7foTsYD5YXvYWPQEyJwFEUkSmmZ1cfcbeer8PE/cube-1.png)

It’s interesting that horse brings us much more associations than cube. Words are not equal: some of them have more power than the others. From my Catena experience I can conclude that there are special kind of words able to produce lots of strong associations and quickly bring us to the other end of catena. I call them portals as they are often related to movement (for example, gate, train, station…) and horse is one of them.

Let’s choose the most powerful words and build one more level of branches off them:

![cube-2.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmTEXmNaFYHAD5qRCs4cQPquVt2nFsscYrFvdp4TkcUERk/cube-2.png)

At this stage, connections start appearing.  

Some possible results:

**Horse — Sleigh — Winter — Ice — Cube
Horse — Nomad — Move — Box — Cube**

Make one more level of associations if needed.

## Contest Announcements

1. A note to those who already took part in the contest: you still can grow your chances for victory by resteeming the original post (you’ll get twice as much chance to win the Random Prize) or promoting your entry (the one with most upvotes will receive The People's Choice Award)!
2. Some participants didn’t add their bitshares name to their entries.  It’s not too late to add them now, otherwise they will be disqualified because they couldn’t receive the prizes.

## Contest Sponsors

The contest’s sponsor is Whaleshares, a community of creative Steemians founded by @officialfuzzy.

The vision of Whaleshares community and BeyondBitcoin Hangout Series is to give people a voice to speak about their favorite projects in the blockchain tech space. We need to enable more people and incentivize more crypto savvy content creators to be part of the community, help build and benefit from in a synergistic union.

[Join the community](https://discord.gg/T56Pjj9) in our fast growing 24/7 Discord server offering many channels from general talk to post promotion to more contests!

#### Credits

A big thanks to @maxy-hopkins for proofreading the text. Max is a young traveler who joined steemit recently in order to share his journey. He post regularly on a variety of topics, but at the heart of the conversation is his adventure.

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### Now it’s your turn — go for it and use your mind at full power! 

In one of the next posts I will share more about concept mapping, a powerful productivity tool which can improve our thinking, boost learning, and help presenting the results to the others.

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<div class="pull-left"><img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmcDnLNL8eNbJJfqtH2joJmWjRUv2KnXUq8NdPu924fRzy/3-vit2.jpg" /></div>I'm a blogger, web designer, entrepreneur, world citizen and a father to eight. If you've enjoyed this post, follow me at @vitkolesnik.