A flashcard application is said to be guilty of the Flip Fixation Flaw when the developer’s attempt to emulate the experience of studying and flipping a physical flashcard comes at the cost to the student of time or software functionality.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with creating a digital flashcard experience within educational software which is modeled upon the original physical paper based flashcard. This only becomes a problem when the marginal benefit of this approach is outweighed by the cost in terms of speed, space, and visual experience.

It’s Not Just about the Flipping

The three most common ways developers commit the flip fixation flaw are:

Lost Speed – When there is a non-trivial amount of time wasted upon creating the visual experience of “flipping” a digital flashcard to show another side of the card or sweep the card off the screen to show the next card. Because reviewing a well-studied flashcard can take less than a second, anything but the fastest flip animations can easily double the time it takes for a student to study a medium to high volume of flashcards.

If developers really want to flip the cards, then please: flip’em really fast!

Lost Space – In order to further give the user the impression they are looking at a physical card, developers often draw an image of a rounded or regular rectangle on the screen in which the content of the card is displayed and upon which the flip action is performed. This is a terrible waste of screen real estate because both the card and sometimes dozens of precious pixels are being wasted that might have been better put to slave labor portraying bigger fonts or more text.

Even if you want to “flip” the digital flashcard, we don’t need to waste screen space on a cute little flashcard, just flip the whole screen or canvas on the window.

Lost Memories – Some developers, who apparently really miss the real thing, like to create flashcards which reproduce the red vertical line and blue horizontal lines on ancient paper flaschards and elementary school notebooks.

Get over it, move on! Are you worried the users are going to type out of line or off the left margin? It may spark moments of nostalgia for people like myself who have actually used the brand of physical flashcards that looked like this, but no, we really don’t want to stare at the blue and red lines when we practice our flashcards.

Most flashcard developers realize however, that this approach has a certain disadvantage to it based upon a necessary assumption the developer makes about the user. Either the developer assumes the user is only interested in studying a card in one given direction (e.g. Russian to English) or they assume that one’s performance in either direction is roughly equivalent (if I know it in one direction Russian to English, then I probably know it in the other direction, English to Russian, roughly as well). This is, of course, rarely the case.¹ While some language learners are primarily interested in studying in one direction, most will want to have both passive recognition and active recall of a vocabulary word, being both able to immediately recognize its meaning when read, but also recall the word when thinking of the word in one’s own native language.

Most flashcard applications allow you to control the direction of study or reverse it. iFlash (review upcoming) allows you to reorder the two or three or more sides of a card shown or even randomize the direction of cards but in interval study it records performance for all directions together. Mental Case (see my review) allows you to designate the “note reversibility” for a card, and can thus prompt you in multiple directions for a card, but again this information is not recorded independently.

There are a number of methods for confronting this problem but the most elegant approach I have seen so far is taken by the most advanced software applications such as Anki (see my earlier review) and I believe that other flashcard developers would do well to consider emulating the approach.

Anki has chosen for its the fundamental unit of knowledge a ‘fact’ which consists of, for example, a word and its definition, and in the case of three sided Asian language cards, its pronunciation. The difference between this and the card approach is that a fact that a fact can be a mother to two or three cards each with their own intervals and directions. Anki stores the fundamental ‘fact’ information independently of the users performance in the application and when you enter information for the ‘fact’ the application can be configured to automatically add two or three cards associated with that card in the various directions that the user wants to study.

For example, if I’m studying Japanese or Chinese, I may want to be able to record, independently, my performance across time in interval study in all three of the following directions: 1) be shown the English and then guess the Kanji/Hanzi characters as well as their pronunciation (and tones in the case of Chinese) 2) be shown the pronunciation (and tones) and be able to guess the characters and meaning in English and 3) be shown the Kanji/Hanzi character and be able to guess the pronunciation and English meaning. In most cases I think learners of Chinese and Japanese will at least want to review in directions (1) and (3) so advanced flashcard applications like Anki allow you to automatically create cards to that effect when the facts have been inputted. These cards then progress along their own interval study schedule as you review them.

Because, however, Anki maintains a relationship between cards and facts, when the content of the original fact is changed, so too is the content of any cards associated with the fact. This is a big advantage over other applications which might be tempted to simply let the user create duplicate cards in other directions. In another advanced interval study focused application Memosyne (see my review), for example, you can create “Vice versa” cards which then tracks the performance on the reversed card separately. However, if you then go and correct or edit a card, it will not correct the corresponding reversed card. Anki does not suffer from this problem.

Given this fact to card relationship, however, it means there is a significant separation between applications which acknowledge the relationship and those which don’t which impacts the full exchangeability of data between them. If you export data from Anki you get cards, without the preserved link between cards that are born of the same fact.

I hope that flashcard application developers reflect on the benefits of this approach and the power it gives to users in maintaining large collections of flashcards that need to be memorized in multiple directions. Implementation of this kind of feature likely requires adding a layer of complexity to the way that the data is maintained, but I have become convinced that the advantages are truly significant, especially for those who want to engage in long-term study.

1. Though I do find that active mastery of a word, going from, say English to Russian, makes it far more likely that you know the reverse.

I’m wondering if this is a completely insurmountable programming problem in OS X or if perhaps the Cocoa programming API does offer some way of overcoming this issue.

Today I found this in the reference for the NSTextFieldCell class:

setAllowedInputSourceLocales – Sets an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.

allowedInputSourceLocales – Returns an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.

I don’t know much about Cocoa programming but I wonder if these two things (OS X 10.5) or something similar can be used to help remedy the problem?

Also, programmers might want to read over this posting about keyboard events and non-Roman languages.

This weblog will post some reviews of programs I have come across recently from the perspective of an experience language learner and amateur software tinkerer. They will mostly be limited to software for Mac OS X and will all be written from the perspective a language student.

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