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How to use flash card for studying?

Flash cards are very useful learning tools. They can provide so-called "active recall". That means we can use them to recall our memory and understanding about the concepts, methods and subjects.

Although very useful, its creation is a real challenge. How to create effective flash cards that can help us accelerate the learning procedure? I try to answer this question in this blog post.

Flash cards are the most useful tools in asking questions. That means every flash card should be a question, like "Is Abraham Lincoln a good president?" or "What is 3+5?". Each question represents a certain category: definite question and open question.

What is definite question? A definite question means that the answer is unique and determined. Like "What is 3+5?", the answer is 8. This kind of questions we can use flash cards to solve them quite easily. Just like an exercise.

What is open question? Open question is the kind of question which you cannot give a definite answer, or it has multiple angles to answer. Like "Is Abraham Lincoln a good president?" These questions can help you think, dream. You cannot be wrong in answering them, only the quality of your answer matters.

So for each subject, you need two decks of cards: one for definite questions, the other for open questions.

There are 4 kinds of information that we will encounter in studying anything:
  1.  Concepts: They have meaning, and examples.
  2.  Facts: Things that need to be remembered. Like the meaning of html tag
  3.  Methods: The idea, the execution, the strength and weakness, and the comparison to other methods. Also have examples. It will be studied best if we have actual questions which will apply the method. (Like a programming problem for a specific algorithm)
  4.  Questions: Definite questions and open questions
Four parts are intertwined, we should build our concepts / facts cards, then move to methods, finally we can build the question cards. 

I recommend a free tool called "Anki", it is very user-friendly and very powerful. I hope you will enjoy using it.

That's enough for this post.

See you in the next one!

Take care, Bye Bye!
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Location: Ulm, Germany

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