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Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

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Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#161

Post by nuclearnice1 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #94
nuclearnice1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great idea. Thanks for sharing. Just to restate what you said, adding nothing. Imagine you had Anki for a similar cohort studying a coherent single course. You’ll be able to get a sense of what topics confuse everyone and what correlation there are in confusion. If you had trouble with X, then you need extra guidance on A & B.

I’m a teacher. There is a great deal to the profession that does depend on experience, intuition and relationship building; however, better data on what - exactly - my students know/can do would be a great boon. I believe better assessment tools are the key here, but SRS system data would be another useful channel (and does, of course, have an assessment component to it).

What level of granularity do you think about “what the students know?”

do problems, say in math, map to concepts? students don’t know concepts? Or is it more subtle?

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#162

Post by ipsum2 »

nullsense wrote: post #156
cehrlich wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Anki to learn Japanese for about a year now, quite successfully. The largest factor determining your daily reviews is your daily new cards - it depends on retention somewhat, but in general daily reviews after a few months stabilize at around 10x daily new cards. So the best way to use Anki is to limit your daily new cards to an amount where you can easily handle the reviews. And yeah, you basically c…

Fun fact: when learning Japanese a decade ago I did 35 new cards a day for 2 years. I hit 400 reviews a day and review sessions were several hours. One day I just stopped and deleted it all.

How's your Japanese now?

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#163

Post by TheTrotters »

m3kw9 wrote: post #37

Isn't Anki good only for memorization? Spaced repetition doesn't seem to help learning how something relates to another logically like how to determine when to use what programming patterns.

It's great for math, for example.

It's spacing + testing effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect

Suppose you can solve some problem or prove some theorem today. Then you try to do it again next week, next month and so on. It's very different from rote memorization.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#164

Post by sah55 »

a-dub wrote: post #154

Tried anki in college, found that creating the cards took too much time and doing them was boring. What did work for me was really simple. A single 8 1/2 by 11 double sided sheet of paper could usually fit everything I needed to memorize at one given time. I'd write out a cheat sheet (a very valuable exercise in condensing and distilling while reviewing) and then reproduce it from memory before and after bed three da…

This is just memorization through brute repetition without the SRS optimization. Less efficient, and more time consuming.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#165

Post by vinay427 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #153
divan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I use Anki for more than a decade, and every single time there is a touch of frustration that Anki UX stuck in mid-2000. Another super annoying feature is that historically Anki is free except iOS – somehow mentality of "iOS users are rich" sneaked in – and Anki for iOS costs ~25$. This makes it prohibitively hard to recommend Anki to non-Android users, especially to younger generation which virtually d…

Please don't equate UX to a particular era. UX is how a thing works . That is a timeless quality. Anki UX just sucks. I agree. Even if it were year 2000, its UX is not great.

I think they may have meant UI, at least more than UX. The visuals of the interface feel like they're from about a decade ago, and while I don't really mind this on my minimal Linux desktop environment because it's at least clearly laid out, it's a little aesthetically out-of-place on some other systems.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#166

Post by IanCal »

codyb wrote: post #86
wenc wrote: post #72

Just wondering if anyone has tried combining Anki with handwriting for improved retention? (any personal experiments?) In language learning, memorizing words in a shallow way tends to not be as helpful as memorizing them in a sentence (shallow vs deep encoding). One can try to ankify sentences, but it's too easy to click on the green button and fool oneself that one has mastered the sentence. Anki works great for sni…

I’ve used Anki prior and always wished there was an easy way to inject a bit of randomness into it. For instance, you could have the idea of a “template” such as and a . A lot of times things probably would be a bit non sensical such as “They went to the bank and saw an apple.” “She will go to the Eiffel Tower to see a motorboat.” But I always thought it would really help me a lot more than the more rote aspects. Of…

I think you can embed JavaScript in a card so you could do this. You'd probably want something to help you create them though.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#167

Post by wendyshu »

waxachasee wrote: post #67
wendyshu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example?

Anki is used a lot in medical education. There's a lot of small details, and you can string them along to form the big picture. An example is going from symptoms -> diagnosis -> treatment options -> drug side effects. You can't just memorize use drug X for Y, but you incorporate information that you know to formulate the best plan. Suppose the patient has kidney disease - you've memorized X is nephrotoxic so you find…

Sure there's a lot of memorization in medical school but I'm more interested in computer science, the context of the article.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#168

Post by armatav »

divan wrote: post #142
Jabbles wrote: post #33

I have used Anki productively, I think it's a great tool, and should be a component of learning in many fields. But I can't help but think it could be a lot better, a lot more efficient, perhaps even 2x more. Anki allows you to customise many aspects of when cards are shown. But presumably those settings can be tuned for a individual, a subject, or even a card. One person probably doesn't have enough data to know wha…

So much this. I use Anki for more than a decade, and every single time there is a touch of frustration that Anki UX stuck in mid-2000. Another super annoying feature is that historically Anki is free except iOS – somehow mentality of "iOS users are rich" sneaked in – and Anki for iOS costs ~25$. This makes it prohibitively hard to recommend Anki to non-Android users, especially to younger generation which virtually d…

It's a one-time $25 cost. It is also entirely worth it.

iOS users spend an order of magnitude more money than Android users, so that was the creator's logic - use them as the "whales".

It's 100% fine and honestly he should be charging a subscription for such a great app, on every platform.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#169

Post by armatav »

leke wrote: post #16

Trying to learn Finish vocab, Anki made me realize I had terrible recall. Sometimes, I couldn't even remember what the last freaking card was, and I would forget most things the next day, and everything the day after. After about 3 weeks, I had only remembered 3 or 4 words, so I gave up.

In addition to the other comments - underlying health issues related to sleep (i.e. apnea) can destroy recall.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#170

Post by virissimo »

I definitely agree that SRS can reasonably be thought of as a learning superpower. I very much regret that I didn't start using Anki until college.

To save my own kids from such a regret, I've created Boethius, a SRS web application for the classical liberal arts to augment our homeschool curriculum. It's now in public beta here: https://www.boethi.us/.

Let me know what you think!

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