[BlindMath] What are your experiences with Spaced Repetition Systems?

[Rastislav Kish]

Hello list,

for those who have never heard of them, a very brief introduction, SRS is a flashcard style learning technique based on two scientifically well proven facts about human memory:

- Recall is a more efficient learning technique than rereading. Simply put, if you’re given 10 pairs of words, one in your language and another in a foreign language, reading them and then trying to recall what you’ve just read yields much better results than just reading the pairs multiple times.
- Each recall drills the recalled concept deeper into your memory, and the effect is the stronger the closer you are to forgetting the concept, exponentially increasing the time it’s going to last in your mind. This is known as the forgetting curve.

SRS take advantage of these two facts. You create decks of flashcards covering a particular topic, the subject pretty much doesn’t matter, can be anything from foreign languages through medicine to quantum physics. Then, the computer queries you for each QA pair in time when you’re just about to forget it. This:

- Significantly reduces the attention you need to pay to studying, because you’re encountering everything only when it’s really necessary, with a lot of saved time you can make use of to either learn even more, or do some other stuff.
- Makes sure you don’t miss anything, the computer is not gonna forget any pair.

Creating the flashcards takes some time and engagement, but when you already do so, you can literally have thousands of them and the computer will drill them to your brain in the most efficient way possible. Probably the most common application in this field is Anki:

https://apps.ankiweb.net/https://apps.ankiweb.net/

And, as the website nicely summarizes:

> Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it’s a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

now, I’m interested:

- Whether you have successfully employed any SRS in your study and what have you used.
- How satisfied were you with the technical side of your software i.e. convenience of usage, accessibility, functions of the program (like multimedia support, availability on different platforms and their integration, equation support etc.).
- How would you imagine an ideal SRS interface specifically for creating flashcards. In particular, I’m interested whether you’d prefer traditional GUI methods, or, if you would be more for something in style of [markdown2anki](https://github.com/Mochitto/Markdown2Anki) (the relevant Reddit thread [here](https://i.opnxng.com/r/Anki/comments/11sttop/a_new_way_of_building_anki_cards_also_with_code/)), as someone who deals with plenty of coding and being an enthusiastic git user, I do have a thing for these text-based input methods, but I’m not sure what’s the general attitude of visually impaired STEM folks.

Also, I wonder if we have more mailing lists similar to BlindMath, perhaps targeted to STEM in general. Since, this is related to mathematics, but not by any means only to mathematics, as mentioned in the introduction, memory plays an important role regardless of the subject, be it math, physics, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, computer science, etc.

Thanks!

Best regards

Rastislav

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