Brainstorming is a way of generating ideas and organising your thinking on a topic.
If you are feeling anxious about an assignment or lacking in inspiration, brainstorming sets your mind in motion and helps you find concrete ideas.
If you feel that you have too many ideas and are not sure which ones to pursue, brainstorming can help you to narrow them down.
Brainstorming also helps you to place your ideas into a useful order and consider the relationship between them so that you can start planning your assignment.
A mind map is a visual representation of your ideas, consisting of words, images and colours. It allows you to construct an overview of the topic so that you can see its complexities more clearly and identify relationships between different aspects of the topic.