The Stackz Color Concept

The Stackz Color Concept

Stackz follows the widely known learning system with cards in levels (boxes), where the cards move up (right) and down (left) the levels depending on their test outcome. Stackz adds one important detail that does not exist with physical cards: With Stackz, the cards change their color based on the duration of inactivity or other criteria. This article shows an entire scenario of how this simple idea unfolds in a real learning session.

Typical scenario

In this example, a Lession ("Lesson 1") has 9 cards, depicted as a stack (i.e. pile, or deck) of cards. They are all placed in the center (neutral) box, to reflect the unknown initial state - they may be actually known, or not. 

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There is a color band along the top, currently covering a range of one day. The color band is lightest at the right hand side (representing today) and gets darker towards the left hand side (representing yesterday). The small grey hatched area at the right edge represents uninitialized data. The stack is of the uninitialized color, which means that the 9 entries have never been tested at all.

Step 1 - Separate known and unknown words

To start working with this file, the content of Lesson 1 is tested with the test tool. For each of the entries, the user decides if he knows it or not, and presses the corresponding button in the tool. This process moves known words up (to the right side, level 4) and unknown ones down (to the left side, level 2).

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Note how the color of the promoted (known) cards changes to the color of today, as indicated in the color band above the cards. The color of the demoted (unknown) cards is not changed, as there is still no duration since the last positive test.

Known cards are now separated from unknown cards!

Step 2 - Learn the unknown words

Learning takes on many forms, e.g. working with cards printed on paper, writing them by hand, or reading the original material that contains the words.

On PC and iOS, Stackz offers the learn dialog for learning the unknown cards, using repeated visual presentation of the card attributes, and also reading aloud the texts with the text-to-speech engine, and even handwriting recognition on tablet PCs. Wordlists can be added to the Apple Watch where they are repeatedly presented on the watch face. Another tool on PC is the match dialog where the card attributes must be sorted.

The various elements of the Stackz system provides a very useful support for learning the unknown words in a systematic way by repeated visual and audible presentation. 

Stackz on PC
Stackz on PC
Stackz on iOS and Apple Watch
Stackz on iOS
Paper flashcards
Paper Flashcards

Step 3 - Re-assess the knowledge

After learning the words, the document is opened again on the next day. Note how the color of the entries on the right hand side has changed to the color corresponding to "refreshed 1 day ago". This shows that the last positive test lies in the past and that the reliability of the classification has decreased (although here it's by just one day).

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All words are re-tested now. In this example, one of the hard words is still unknown, and one of the yesterday known words fails the re-test today, leading to the representation depicted below.

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This is how the visualization in a Stackz lesson works. There are some "hard words on the left that need to be learnt, and some "easy" words on the right that need to be refreshed once in a while. In the middle, there are some words that are generally known but tend to be forgotten easily.

The Stackz visual feedback helps concentrate your effort on learning the unknown words, and refreshing the known words when they turn dark. The more words there are, the more important a representation like this becomes.