Filed Under: Tech in Education

Note: This is NOT an advertisement for ANKI. They have a free desktop version of the program, but I do use their paid iOS app ($24.99), #2 in Education apps¹. I do not get any commission for this, I’m just an advocate of their system and app!

While I’m trying my best to allow my children to just be children, I’m not totally about disconnecting them from technology. The intentional use of technology can bring significant benefits to the learning process for our household. Using a kindle and a public library account (or Amazon Kids+), we have access to millions of children’s books for free, at the click of a button. Well-made Computer Science courses can teach programming, logic, and math concepts through the form of challenging puzzles. We leverage ChatGPT to generate an unimaginable amount of exciting content through stories². 

Last week, we achieved an exciting milestone with both kids when they completed the study of the top 300 most common English words using a flash cards program called Anki. It was an eleven-week journey of learning 5 new words per day, in addition to reviewing older words in a strategically compiled deck, in an algorithmically-driven review process. In actuality, they averaged about 53 reviews/day in ~10-15 minutes. It’s such a short amount of time that we did it while waiting for the bus, fidgeting upside down on the couch, or swinging on a hammock.

Result: In about 10-15 minutes/day for 11 weeks, they can now read and understand 65% of the written English language!  

So What’s the Big Deal?

I know this isn’t totally new. This can be achieved with traditional pen and paper flash cards, that’s true. The two key points I want to call out are:

• Anki makes memorization much more efficient – you can either learn more efficiently, learn more, or both.
• The ability for an adult to focus on a specific topic, like learning Spanish or med-school vocabulary is the general use. Applying it to the vast breadth of learning a child could be incredible.

Here’s how I’ll break the rest of this post up:

• First, I’ll explain a little bit about what Anki is
• Then, I’ll cover how I currently use it with my children
• Lastly, I’ll touch on how I hope to use it for my children’s longer-term education

So What is Anki?

Anki is a system that helps systematically ferry content from the point that you are first introduced to it through various intervals until it’s finally locked tight in your long-term memory. It does this through three key features³:

1. Active Recall Testing: Anki engages users in actively recalling information from memory during reviews, significantly enhancing memory retention and understanding.
2. Use It or Lose It: This principle in Anki emphasizes the importance of regular review and practice to prevent forgetting previously learned material.
3. Spaced Repetition System (SRS): Anki uses a scientifically proven method where the intervals between reviews are adjusted based on how well you remember each item, making memorization more efficient.

“The single biggest change that Anki brings about is that it means memory is no longer a haphazard event, to be left to chance. Rather, it guarantees I will remember something, with minimal effort. That is, Anki makes memory a choice.”

Michael A. Nielsen, “Augmenting Long-term M⁴emory”

So the idea is that you can create a deck with any kind of information you want. Or, quite significantly, you can download a deck someone else has created to use. That’s where I got the deck my kids just made it through: 300 High Frequency Sight Words – 65% of Written English⁵. It was a deck that someone else made for free with 300 pre-made cards that contains the English word, an audio recording of the pronunciation of the word, and an example sentence that uses it. Because Anki is actually just a system that can incorporate text, audio, and images, its uses are so widespread: medical terms, learning a new language, or learning an instrument. If you can think of it, a deck may already exists that you can use.

Using the app is actually pretty simple. You go into any deck you have, and the first card queued up for that day will appear. You look at it and guess what the answer is. Depending on how hard it is, (Easy, Good, Hard, Again), it will either show up more quickly (as soon as 1 minute later) or be sent further out into the future (potentially months or even years). Every time you look at the card, you simply try your best to answer it, then select how difficult it was. The system will do whatever it needs to with its algorithm in the background to reclassify it and show it to you when you need to see it again.

OPTIONAL: Click here to expand and see some of the detailed statistics that accompany each deck, including the day’s performance, a projection of the number of cards due each day, and card count categorization.

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What It Looks Like

The two screenshots below show what the basic interface of the Anki app on my phone:

Changing the Paradigm of Learning

This leads me to the most intriguing point of the system: there is no fail. Unlike a school exam, where you need to know information by a certain time (the time of the test), Anki operates on a continuous basis. If you can’t read the word “write” for an exam, you get it wrong – it’s a fail for the question and held against you. If you don’t know it for Anki, it’s not a fail but rather an indication that you don’t know it yet, and that you need to see it again sooner rather than later. When that time comes, again, if you still don’t know it yet, it will show up even sooner in your sequence. At whatever point you do start to get it, it will start to show up with less and less frequency until it is known rote. I absolutely love this approach, because you do away with an arbitrary timeline to know something. As long as you:

1. Deem the information worthy enough to be made into a flashcard
2. Put in the daily effort to review your Anki cards

Then you will eventually learn what you want to learn. Practice and effort is all it takes. This is a principle that I am trying to develop into my homeschooling approach overall, but I readily and humbly acknowledge that it is much easier said than done.

What Information is Worth Knowing?

This does lead to an interesting follow-up question: With the power to insert a card into a deck and set in motion the steps to permanently lodge the information into you or your child’s memory, who then decides what information is worthy of long-term memory? That’s the general notion of school: that some board or body has dictated a standardized curriculum of all relevant information a child needs to know. But just because I can make a flashcard that defines the term “light-year” as 5.88 million miles/year, doesn’t mean I should. Our brains do only have a limited capacity, and that space might be better-suited for more relevant knowledge.

I wonder how much information we’ve “learned” as we grew up but managed to “lose” due to lack of relevance over the the course of our lives.

What If We Zoom Out and Apply it to a Life?

As you may know from a previous post of mine, I am more seriously diving into how AI can be used to format topics into custom age-appropriate stories for my children to learn. Think of an illustrated story that stars my two children as they board a rocket ship and tour the solar system, learning about each planet along the way. You can read more about that here.

In my pursuit of this topic of tech and education, passions of mine, I’ve been diving into AI and Python, and I believe that the ability to link this AI engine to Anki cards can unlock a really interesting opportunity.

Soon, I hope that these AI-generated stories and explanations can also generate corresponding Anki cards that capture any relevant content. Think of the following queries that could automatically generate a new flashcard for your child’s deck:

Example ChatGPT Prompt	Anki Cards Generated
What are the planets in our Solar system?	Eight cards, one for each planet with a brief description
How do plants make energy from sunlight?	An Anki card on Photosynthesis
Where does rain come from?	A basic outline of the water cycle

• Term
• Age-appropriate definition
• Example sentence
• Spanish + Malayalam form
• Date added
• Categories (Astronomy, Biology, History, etc)
• Child
• Age

Because I’m homeschooling my children, I am, for better or worse, their steward of knowledge for now. It means I can begin compiling a lifelong Anki deck for each child that slowly accumulates any relevant and critical information as they learn it. We go through each day as normal, learning whatever topics are at-hand: astronomy, history, geography, math, etc. A component of each day will be a review of their life’s Anki deck to bring up whatever cards are queued up for that day. Things they know are thrown out farther into the future, and things they didn’t quite get yet are queued up again for more rapid review.

This leads to my final two points:

• Curiosity is not about Pass/Fail exams. It’s a continuous journey that is guided by questions. At any point in time, we either know what we need to, or we don’t know it yet. Anki helps us reclassify our knowledge efficiently in this manner.
• What information, especially in this day and age, is actually critical for someone to memorize?

While I continue with the longer journey of python and AI exploration, I’ve moved the kids onto another pre-made deck: the top 3500 English words with Spanish translation⁶. This is a beast of a deck, so we’ll chip away at it, 5 words/day, and see how things go.

I hope you enjoyed this write-up! If you did, please consider subscribing to keep up with more content and please share with anyone you think may be interested in technology in education!

Resources

1. Link to the iOS Paid App ↩︎
2. ThrivingFries: My Children’s Book: AI-Powered Storytelling ↩︎
3. A comprehensive guide and explanation from the official Anki documentation ↩︎
4. Augmenting Long-term Memory ↩︎
5. Anki Deck: 300 High Frequency Sight Words – 65% of Written English ↩︎
6. Anki Deck: 3500 Most Common English Words (with Spanish Translation) ↩︎