"Yeah, right!" - I hear you say. Well, give me a few minutes and let's see who gets the last laugh.

Flashcards are great! No doubt about that, right? They have been used for many decades now to teach the alphabet, names of animals or mathematical equations.

However, up until now, flashcards where limited. They only had two sides - the front and the back. The idea was to flip them when needed. That was it. It was wonderful in its simplicity.

Evolution of flashcards

Now, flashcards can be smart! They can be driven by an algorithm, for example. Some apps use fancy adaptive learning formulas. They analyze how you use the flashcards and respond accordingly. It's a great improvement, a sort of evolution.

Multidecker takes this evolution step further. It invites more brain power to your flashcard experience. Multidecker encourages you to use logical and mathematical intelligence to put the new bits of knowledge in some categories.

Enough talking. Do you want to see how it works in practice?

Scenario

Words to describe personality

You are learning words that describe personality. Here is a hypothetical list:

• brave,
• benevolent,
• chatty,
• clever,
• cowardly,
• friendly,
• generous,
• grumpy,
• mean,
• quiet,
• selfish,
• vain.

With Multidecker smart flashcards you can boost your learning by creating - for example - two different kinds of decks, like so:

or like this one - mind you - the names are not real :-)

Let's take a closer look.

• The first game divides the traits into positive and negative. We used a deck type with two custom answers.
• The second deck is about some imaginary friends: Julia, Brandon and Olive. I assigned them these personal qualities. This deck should probably be private;-) To create it, we used a deck type with three custom answers.

Can you see what my point is? Instead of just creating simple two-sided flashcards, you have put a lot more brain power into learning these new vocabulary items. My humble experience as a teacher dictates that this is a far more effective way to learn and remember vocabulary.