Flashcard Hero 3.5

Flashcard Hero is intended to help you study. In this respect, the application uses the popular flashcard technique, which is mainly useful for learning factual information. Compared with using paper flashcards, this tool has the main advantage of saving you from manually keeping track of what you have already mastered.

Flashcard Hero is quite easy to use. In this sense, it is great that its interface has tabs matching the intended workflow. Thus, you can start by writing your cards, study their contents and monitor your progress. By the way, I find that classifying cards by difficulty levels as Not Studied, Difficult, Somewhat Difficult and Memorized is especially convenient to let you focus on what requires more study time.

Good news is that the application smartly manages your learning. It lets you see the list of cards you are to study in the upcoming days. Besides, if you fail to remember the facts on a given card, it is scheduled for further reviewing. What is more, the tool supports the so-called Leitner system, also known as Space Repetition. This means that you are asked to review a given card in increasing time intervals, which favors long-term over short-term memory.

As to creating cards, it is good that you can add long texts instead of just pairs of words. Luckily, text formatting and lists are also supported. Likewise, it is possible to include images and audio. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to insert video clips as well.

It is great that Flashcard Hero can help you assess your learning with quizzes. In this regard, two different types of questions can be created: short-answer and multiple-choice. Fortunately, the application can help you save some time by generating choices for the questions without your intervention. The limitations of the tools are logically related to those of the flashcard method itself, which promotes learning by heart at the expense of active learning and critical thinking.

All in all, Flashcard Hero is a great choice for rote learning, particularly facts and vocabulary. Fortunately, there are versions of Flashcard Hero for portable devices. Not only that, you can save your card sets on iCloud to synchronize your study between your different devices. The product can be purchased from the Mac App Store. Moreover, there is a free version called Flash Hero Lite, which you can use to explore the tool’s potential. Finally, you should know that that there are other similar applications out there, so you should probably explore a little before deciding to spend some money on any of them.