About Flash Cards
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since Sep 19, 2000.
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About Flash CardsYou are visitor number
since Sep 19, 2000.
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| LinkExchange Member | Free Home Pages at GeoCities |
| Definition: Cards (pieces of paper) with question and answer on opposite sides. |
Usually you have a deck of cards, e.g. 50 question-answer pairs (more than about 100 becomes unhandy). The subjects can be almost anything, for instance a foreign language. You might have English words or phrases on one side and French on the other.
A quiz made with GMT, Griebel's Mobile Tutor, is really an electronical equivalent of flash cards. (And, you can print out ordinary flash cards with GMT).
Any problems?
How to make flash cards:
In other cases
it doesn't make sense.
An example:
You have a deck of cards of animals.
A lion is...a mammal.
A goat is...also a mammal.
You cannot reverse that:
"Which animal is a mammal?"
Many quizzes of this kind appear to
be reversible, but in fact aren't.
A French-English,
or any foreign language quiz,
is
almost
reversible,
but not quite.
You can make some experiments for yourself.
'222' in the code above
is an example; it
works if the available space
on the page is at least
888 pixels,
and you have 4 questions on each page.
An older implementation used
table row height="25%", say.
This doesn't work too well with Netscape,
and MSIE ignores it completely.
The remainder of this paper
describes the new version.
Last page fills with "empty" questions
so that
there is the same number of questions
on each page.
Use Flash Cards
-- Top
There are so many ways to use flash cards.
Here are a few suggestions.
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+
+! ! +! ! +! !
!! Q ! !! A ! !! A !
!! ! !! ! !! !
!+-----+ !+-----+ !+-----+
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+
Coming Incorrectly Correctly
Question answered answered
You hold a deck of cards
with a question and answer on opposite sides.
You hold up one card,
look at the question,
think to yourself:
"The answer is...",
turn the card,
and see the correct answer.
Put the card in one of two decks on the table:
The ones you knew, or the ones you didn't know.
(or alternatively, if your answer was incorrect
you may also put the card right back into the
deck you are holding,
and perhaps reshuffle).
When your hand is empty,
you pick up the deck with the questions you didn't know,
and start over.
For each time you do that
the "did know" pile on the table
will be a little bit bigger.
Finally, when your hand is completely empty,
you may simply start all over again.
You will be surprised to see how quickly you learn.
If you are studying a new subject,
you should limit yourself to a maximum of 100 cards,
better 40 to begin with.
But if the stack contains more than 100 cards,
you might begin by dividing them into groups
which make best sense to you.
If you are studying a foreign language,
you might divide the cards into
nouns, verbs, adjectives, other
-- or any other way that you prefer,
e.g. time, persons, food.
Whatever. It really doesn't matter
much how you divide the deck,
as long as the division makes sense to you.
When you are done
with each of the smaller piles you have created,
you can put them together again.
Now it is not an entirely new subject,
now you know something, a little bit, about it,
and now 100 cards, or 250 cards, is not too many.
Sometimes it makes sense to
make the answer the question and vice versa.
Not always, but sometimes.
For instance,
a French-English vocabulary quiz.
What is French for horse?
What does the French word cheval mean?
etc.
How do I make "page shifts" in a browser?
-- Top
Page shifts affect only your print, of course.
I am using tables, like this:
[table style="page-break-before:always" ]
[tr height='222']
[td width='50%']the question[/td]
[td width='50%']the answer[/td]
[/tr]
:
(4 Q/A pairs, in this case)
:
[/table]
[table style="page-break-before:always" ]
[tr height='222']
[td width='50%']the question[/td]
[td width='50%']the answer[/td]
[/tr]
:
(etc.)
:
Page shifts don't work for you?
-- Top
Browsers work differently,
and this is an experimental system.
Page shifts seem to work as intended
with the two "big" browsers version something.
Remarks about the browsers:
MSIE:
When you print a page,
especially flash cards for the chess quizzes,
remember to turn on printing of
background images and colours
(it's in the advanced settings somewhere).
Or else the result will look silly.
Actually, in a future implementation
I am going to make the background colour
all white, you will have to deduce the
colour of each field yourself.
This is much to prefer
when print out is copied
on some other material,
for instance.
Netscape Navigator:
No problems reported yet.
Print Flash Cards
-- Top
You can print the file directly,
or save it to disk
to print at a later time
(except for the chess flash cards
which must be printed right away).
Each page has two coloumns:
Questions on the left side,
answers on the right,
like this:
+---------+
! Q A !
! Q A !
! Q A !
! Q A !
! Q A !
+---------+
Fold Flash Cards
-- Top
Fold each and every printed page
precisely along the central vertical axis of the paper
so that the questions and the answers end up on opposite pages.
+----:----+
! Q : A !
! Q : A !
! Q : A !
! Q : A !
! Q : A !
+----:----+
^ Fold here
Glue Flash Cards
-- Top
Unfold,
apply glue to the back of the paper.
Fold again, glue the back of the paper onto itself.
(a way to skip the folding and gluing part...)
-- Top
Using a photo copier
you can copy the printed pages
on both the front and the back of the resulting page.
You can use quality paper instead of the usual stuff.
When you cut the questions apart,
you will end up with two sets instead of one.
Cut out Flash Cards
-- Top
Cut along the lines.
You can use a scissor.
You can also use a special cutting device
as the ones most print houses have.
Some can cut very precisely.
You might be able to cut the whole stack at once.
Mike L. Griebel,
mgriebel@hotmail.com
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