As the founder and CEO of Brainscape, I have had numerous conversations over the past several years about flashcards’ effectiveness as a study tool.
I find it amazing how passionate people can be about flashcards! Some people recall their schooldays spent making flashcards quite nostalgically, while others remember having avoided flashcards like the plague. My own challenge as Brainscape’s founder has been creating an online flashcard platform that appeals to both types of learners.
Flashcard lovers
The first of the types of flashcard users is those who love them. Targeting the flashcard-loving type has been the easier part.
Brainscape’s convenient deck-creation platform allows flashcard enthusiasts to create, sort, and study their cards much in the same way that they would naturally with paper cards. In fact, it offers even greater functionality than regular flashcards by enabling the addition of web images, uploaded sounds, and even user-recorded sounds on each flashcard; and by allowing the user to sync their decks to the Brainscape mobile app.
Eliminating the need to carry around cumbersome decks of physical flashcards is a huge quality-of-life improvement for people who already appreciate the benefits of flashcards.
[If you're a flashcard lover, you'll enjoy our full guide on how to create and study with flashcards. You're welcome!]
Flashcard haters
The real challenge has been creating a flashcard platform that even flashcard-haters can even get behind. And the way we do that is to make using flashcards require much less work!
That means less work creating flashcards, and less work studying them. Brainscape saves time on the flashcard creation efforts by offering a huge marketplace of flashcards, and by allowing users to share decks in collaborative study groups and thereby distribute the authoring tasks evenly among many people.
We also save users time studying flashcards through our automated confidence-based repetition process, which ensures you are reviewing concepts in a pattern tailored specifically to your brain. No longer do you have to waste time flipping through flashcards that you already know.
I’ll know that Brainscape has truly succeeded when both types of flashcard users, even the world’s flashcard-haters, have recognized that our platform is the most effective way to study :)
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