Flashcard Maker

Two modes: build the deck, then study it

The tool opens in Edit Cards mode with one blank card waiting. Each card has two boxes, Front for the question or term and Back for the answer or definition. Fill both, press Add Card, and keep going until the deck is the size you want. There is no cap on how many cards you can add, and the bin icon on any card removes it, though the last remaining card cannot be deleted.

The Study button at the top shows a running count in brackets of how many cards are actually ready. A card only counts once both sides have text in them, so a half-finished card sitting at the bottom of your list will not turn up mid-session. When the count looks right, hit Study and the deck flips into review mode.

If you just want to see how it behaves before typing anything, Load sample cards drops in eight ready-made questions covering capitals, times tables, chemistry, Shakespeare, planets, history, biology and geography. They are easy to overwrite once you have had a look.

Flipping and moving through the deck

In study mode the card fills most of the screen. Click anywhere on it and it turns over with a half-second flip, the front in violet and the back in green, so at a glance you can tell whether you are looking at the prompt or the answer. Click again to turn it back.

The keyboard does the same job without reaching for the mouse. Space, the up arrow and the down arrow all flip the card. The left and right arrow keys step backwards and forwards through the deck, and the arrow buttons either side of the counter do the same thing on a touchscreen. The counter underneath reads something like 4 / 12, so you always know how far through you are. When you reach the last card, the next press wraps around to the first.

Shuffle Cards reorders the whole deck and drops you back at card one. Worth pressing between passes: it is very easy to start remembering that the answer to card six is Jupiter purely because it comes after card five, which is not the same as knowing it.

What tends to work as a card

Flashcards reward one fact per card. A card asking for the capital of France is a good card. A card asking you to list the causes of the First World War is really six cards pretending to be one, and it is the kind of card people quietly skip. If the back of a card runs to more than a short sentence, it is usually worth splitting.

The pairs that suit this format best are the ones with a clean two-sided answer: Spanish or French vocabulary and its English meaning, an element and its symbol from the periodic table, a Greek or Latin root and what it means, a date and its event, a definition and its term, a keyword and its formula. Younger children get on well with decks of ten to fifteen cards; older students revising for an exam can reasonably carry a hundred, though it helps to break those into topic-sized decks and run them separately.

Writing the cards is itself part of the revision. If you are making a deck for a child, it is usually better to sit with them while they type the answers in than to hand over a finished deck, because the act of deciding what belongs on each side is where a fair amount of the learning happens.

Free, in the browser, and nothing to sign up for

Everything runs in the page you already have open. There is no account to create, no email address to hand over and no limit on how many decks you make. It works the same on a classroom desktop, a home laptop, a tablet or a phone, though typing out a long deck is far quicker on a keyboard.

One thing worth knowing before you start a big deck: the cards live in the browser tab and are not saved anywhere. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored, which is good for privacy but does mean that closing or refreshing the tab clears the deck. For a deck you want to keep and reuse, type it into a document or a notes app first and paste the sides across when you want to study, or keep the tab open for the session.