Core features

Practice

Everything that happens when you press Start session: card types, practice modes, the adaptive algorithm, XP, streaks, and how to flag a problem card.

Card types

Educator uses eight card formats. Every card in the corpus is authored as one of these types. The type is chosen to match what the subject actually demands, not to fill variety for its own sake.

Recall

A short-answer card. You type your response and it is checked against the correct answer plus an accepted answers list that covers common alternative spellings, abbreviations, and phrasings. Answers are typically four words or fewer.

Prompt:

What nutrient is the primary energy source in a diet?

Correct answer:

Carbohydrates (also accepted: carbs, carbohydrate)

Multiple choice (MCQ)

Four options, one correct. Distractors are designed to be plausible (the answers a student who half-knows the topic might choose), never silly red herrings. In History, both the correct answer and the distractors are often full explanatory sentences, because History examiners reward contextual reasoning.

Prompt:

Why did Germany experience hyperinflation in 1923?

Options:

The government printed money to pay reparations after France occupied the Ruhr. ✓
The USA called in its loans following the Wall Street Crash.
The Reichstag passed an emergency budget that doubled taxation.
Germany defaulted on its war-bond repayments to domestic investors.

Match-pairs

Several terms are shown on the left and their definitions on the right, shuffled. You tap a term on the left, then its matching definition on the right, to connect each pair. All pairs must be correct to earn the card. A pair is marked by the text on the tile you picked, so where two tiles carry the same words either one counts. Match cards cover vocabulary sets where learning terms in isolation would be artificial.

Example (Food GCSE, vitamins):

Vitamin C: Needed for healthy skin and gums; found in citrus fruit
Vitamin D: Helps absorb calcium; made by the skin in sunlight
Vitamin A: Supports vision in dim light; found in liver and carrots
Vitamin B12: Required for red blood cell production; found in meat and dairy

True / False

A factual statement is shown. Tap True or False. The card back explains why the statement is correct or incorrect. Good for misconceptions and commonly confused facts.

Statement:

“Saturated fats are liquid at room temperature.”

Answer: False. Saturated fats are solid at room temperature; unsaturated fats are typically liquid.

Cloze (fill-the-blank)

A sentence with one word or phrase removed, shown as a blank. You type the missing word or words: most cloze answers are one word, and the hint under the prompt (“One word.”, “Two words.”) is worked out from the card's own answer, so it always tells you how many to type. Cloze cards are particularly effective for definitions, processes, and formula structures where the surrounding context carries most of the meaning.

Prompt:

Osmosis is the movement of water molecules through a partially permeable membrane from a region of high water potential to a region of ___ water potential.

Answer: low

Fill the gap (Scaffold)

A model paragraph or explanation with a key term replaced by a dropdown or MCQ option. You pick the correct term to complete the passage. Scaffold cards are particularly effective for extended-response topics where seeing a well-structured answer and identifying the missing component builds both vocabulary and argument structure. Served in standard sessions where scaffold cards exist for a subject.

Evaluate (Mark it)

A complete model answer to an extended-response question is shown alongside the mark scheme band descriptors. You select the mark band the answer deserves. This is the card type that powers Mark it mode. The entire mode is built on evaluate cards. Only available for subjects and topics where evaluate cards have been authored. Currently in Beta.

Calculation

A numerical question with a unit (e.g. %, £, units). The prompt gives the numbers and a one-sentence ask. The card back shows the formula and worked steps. Used mainly in Business Studies and Science, where numerical fluency is assessed most heavily, with smaller numbers in other subjects that have numerical content (Computer Science, Drama, Food Preparation & Nutrition, Geography, PE Theory and Psychology).

Prompt:

A business sells 2,000 units at £15 each with variable costs of £8 per unit and fixed costs of £6,000. What is the profit?

Card back:

Formula: Profit = Total Revenue − Total Costs

Revenue: 2,000 × £15 = £30,000
Variable costs: 2,000 × £8 = £16,000
Total costs: £16,000 + £6,000 = £22,000
Profit: £30,000 − £22,000 = £8,000

Practice modes

Seven ways to practise, each designed for a different moment in the revision cycle. You choose a mode from the mode picker before each session.

Standard session

The default mode and the everyday way to keep your daily streak going (every other regular mode counts too). A Standard session deals your daily goal in cards: 15 by default, or the number your teacher sets for the class (5/10/15/20/30). Cards are selected by the adaptive picker: skipped and wrong cards that are overdue first, then unseen cards, then cards due for review that you previously got right. This ensures you’re always working on the material that needs the most attention rather than replaying cards you already know well.

Best used: every day, as your primary revision habit.

Speed Round

Fifteen cards with an 8-second countdown per card. If time runs out, the card is marked wrong. Speed Round builds the fluency and pressure tolerance you need in an exam room, where you cannot afford to spend 30 seconds on a factual recall question. The tight clock reveals which knowledge is truly automatic and which is still effortful.

Tip: Run a standard session before your first Speed Round of a topic. You want to consolidate the facts before you drill under pressure, not discover gaps with an 8-second clock.

Note: Match-pairs cards are excluded from Speed Round. The tap-to-pair interaction is incompatible with the 8-second countdown.

Marathon

Fifty cards using the same adaptive picker as the standard session. A Marathon session earns the same XP per card as standard but covers more than three times the ground in one sitting. Designed for the week before an exam when you want a comprehensive sweep of a subject.

Best used: pre-exam revision blocks when you have 10–15 minutes available and want maximum coverage.

Mark it Beta

Extended-response cards that ask you to read a model answer and decide how many marks it would earn under the mark scheme. You are playing examiner rather than student, which forces you to internalise the criteria at a deeper level than recall alone. Mark it is in Beta and only appears in the mode picker for subjects that include evaluate-type cards in their corpus.

Best used: once you are confident on the facts and want to practise applying the mark scheme to extended writing.

Drill weak cards

Pulls only the cards you have answered incorrectly in recent sessions (most recent first) into a single focused session, so you re-attempt your weakest material in one pass. Cards you still get wrong come back through the normal spaced-repetition schedule. This is the fastest way to close specific knowledge gaps rather than waiting for the normal schedule to resurface them.

Best used: after any session where you got several wrong. Do a quick Drill session immediately while the gaps are fresh.

Topic drill

Accessible from the mode picker: scroll to the topic list and tap any topic name to practise only cards from that topic, using the same adaptive ordering as the standard session. Useful when your class has just covered a specific topic and you want targeted reinforcement, or when Class accuracy by topic shows a particular area in red.

Study

30 cards shown prompt-and-answer together with no right/wrong judgment, a read-through rather than a test. Study mode awards 1 XP per card seen (rather than 10 for a correct answer), counts toward your daily streak, and advances unseen cards to the first mastery level. Launch it from the Learn page using the Study this topic or Study this section buttons.

Two things work differently in Study mode. Match-pairs cards are left out, because there is nothing to pair when the answer is already on screen. And the exam tier is ignored, so a Foundation student sees Higher cards too: the point of a read-through is the widest conceptual spread, not a tier-accurate test.

Best used: before attempting practice on a topic you haven't seen yet. Read through once so the first retrieval attempt lands in context rather than cold.

Teachers: Try this deck. the class page has a 🎯 Try this deck button that runs a normal session against that class's own exam board, topic or subtopic filter and science route. It is the quickest way to spot-check what your students will actually be served before you set homework on it. It works even though you are not enrolled in the class, and it uses the class subject rather than your own.

The adaptive card picker

Standard sessions, Speed Round, Marathon, Mark it, topic drills and homework all use the same five-bucket priority ordering. Buckets are worked through in order, so if bucket 1 has no candidates, cards come from bucket 2, and so on:

Skipped + due. Cards skipped in a previous session whose review interval has also elapsed, the highest priority because you already indicated difficulty.
Wrong + due. Cards answered incorrectly whose review interval has elapsed.
Unseen. Cards never shown before, drawn ahead of cards already answered correctly to ensure new material reaches students promptly.
Due and correct. Cards whose interval has elapsed and were previously answered correctly.
Not yet due. Cards whose interval has not elapsed, only drawn when all other buckets are empty.

Unseen cards (bucket 3) are prioritised above cards you have already answered correctly (bucket 4). This means new material is surfaced before revision of familiar cards, preventing the pattern where students see the same cards every session while new content remains unseen.

Two modes order their cards differently. Drill weak cards ignores the buckets entirely and serves your wrong cards most-recently-seen first, because the whole point is to revisit what just went wrong. Study mode inverts the ladder: unseen cards first (the breadth you are there for), then cards that are due and were answered wrong, then everything else at random.

The picker chooses by review status, never by how proficient you are: MCQ, recall, cloze, true/false and the rest are not withheld or unlocked based on performance. The mix of question types in a session mostly reflects what the card bank holds for that subject. Two runtime rules do shape it, though. First, the dealt session is shuffled just enough to break up runs of three or more identical types, so a session never reads as a wall of identical taps. Second, some types are filtered by mode: Mark it serves evaluate cards and nothing else, every other mode leaves evaluate out, and both Speed Round and Study mode also drop match-pairs.

The intervals between reviews are calculated using a variant of the SM-2 spaced-repetition algorithm. Each correct answer extends the gap before the card reappears; each incorrect answer resets it. Response speed also influences the interval. A fast correct answer indicates stronger recall and earns a longer gap than a slow correct answer.

For the full algorithm specification, including ease factors, interval rules, and the five mastery levels (Unseen → Seen → Familiar → Proficient → Mastered), see the Spaced repetition deep dive.

XP and streaks

XP (experience points)

Students earn 10 XP per correct card. Incorrect cards earn nothing. XP is tracked per subject. Food XP and History XP are separate counters. The student's rank label (e.g. Apprentice → Master Chef in Food, Apprentice Scholar → Master Historian in History) is the exception: it is driven by XP across every subject combined. Cosmetics unlock on three separate XP ladders: card skins at five thresholds (0, 500, 1,500, 4,000, and 10,000 XP), avatars at nine thresholds (0, 100, 300, 750, 1,500, 3,500, 7,500, 15,000, and 30,000 XP), and themes at three thresholds (0, 500, and 1,500 XP). XP is counted per subject for school accounts and across all subjects for individual accounts.

An average student completing two 15-card sessions per day at 75% accuracy earns roughly 2,000 XP per week. A student putting in an hour a day at pace earns roughly 16,000 XP per week.

Boss battle events

During themed boss-battle events, every correct card earns 10 + bonus XP. The bonus amount is set per event. The banner on your dashboard tells you when a boss battle is active and when it ends. Complete sessions during the event window to make the most of the boosted rate.

Streaks

A student's streak increments by one every day they complete a regular session: Standard, Speed Round, Marathon, Mark it, Drill weak cards, Topic drills, and Study mode all count. Teacher-hosted live sessions do not count toward the streak. The streak advances once per calendar day (UTC); multiple sessions in one day still only increment it once. Miss a day and a streak freeze is consumed automatically if you have one. Each missed day costs one freeze, and the freezes only save the streak if you hold enough to cover every missed day. If you hold fewer (or none), the streak is lost and your next session starts a fresh streak at day 1, but you keep any freezes you were holding. The done screen then says New streak started today; it only says “Streak protected” when freezes actually kept the streak going.

Earning a lost streak back: losing a streak of three days or more opens a 48-hour grace window. Complete two sessions inside that window and the streak you lost is restored in full, at the number it reached, not at 1. A card on your dashboard tracks it: how many of the two sessions are done, and how many hours are left. Miss the window and nothing bad happens beyond the streak already lost. It simply carries on from the new count. The rescue is deliberately generous for a Year 10 or 11 timetable: two sessions across two days is achievable after a weekend away, while still meaning something.

Streak-saver nudge: if you opt in to web push notifications, Educator sends a single gentle evening reminder on any day you have an active streak but haven't practised yet, just enough to save the streak, never a pressure alarm. Enable push from your profile; on an iPhone you first add Educator to your Home Screen.

Streak freezes

A streak freeze protects your streak on a day you do not complete a session. When you come back after missing days, one freeze is spent for each day you missed. If your reserve covers the whole gap, your streak stays intact and those freezes are spent. If the gap is longer than your reserve, the streak starts again at day 1 and the reserve is kept for next time, so freezes never cover part of a gap. You can hold up to 5 in reserve.

Earning freezes: school students earn +1 freeze for each homework assignment completed (first completion only) and earn one additional freeze for every 7-day streak milestone (capped at 5 total). Free individual accounts outside their 7-day trial cannot earn freezes through homework. They receive freezes only when subscribed to Pro.

Free-tier note: free individual accounts outside their 7-day trial cannot earn streak freezes. If you are away for multiple consecutive days, a Pro subscription or school account is required to build a freeze reserve. A single freeze only protects one missed day.

During a session

Skipping a card

Every card carries a quiet I don't know · skip link. On a phone it sits in the pinned bar for typed cards and below the options for tap cards, with a full-size tap target either way. A skip is treated as “not retrieved” rather than as a wrong answer, but the scheduling effect is the same: the card's interval resets to one day, so it comes back the next day. It earns no XP. Skipping is the honest answer when you genuinely don't know, and it is a better signal than a guess, but it is not a way of shrinking the pile.

Typed answers are marked generously

Recall and cloze cards are typed, and the marking is deliberately lenient. It accepts British or American spelling, small typos on longer words (the tolerance grows with word length, and drops to zero for words of three letters or fewer), plurals, and a missing “a” or “the”. It treats digits and spelled-out numbers as the same thing, ignores thousands separators in numbers, and maps the characters a phone keyboard struggles with, so 62C matches 62°C and H2O matches H₂O. Where an answer lists several things, any one of them counts, and so does naming some of them (“warmth and moisture”). On top of that, each card carries its own accepted-answers list for abbreviations and alternative phrasings.

Lenient does not mean loose: the marking compares whole words, not fragments. Typing the first few letters of an answer (“com” for “comparison”) does not score, and nor does a list of guesses that happens to contain the right word. A shorter or longer answer still scores when the difference is harmless: extra filler words (“it is the heart”), words the question already gives you (“Maillard” when the question asks which reaction), or small connecting words like “of” and “and”. Some specific cases:

Numbers must be exact. The typo allowance never applies to a number, so 1914 or 1940 is wrong for 1941. A number can be typed without its unit (“20” for 20 seconds), and a minus sign matters (5 is not -5).
People: when the question asks for a person, the surname on its own scores (“Dweck” for Carol Dweck). A first name on its own does not.
Monarchs and popes: Roman numerals, digits and ordinals are interchangeable, so “Henry 2” and “Henry the Second” both match Henry II.
Pairs: an “A and B” answer also accepts “B and A”.

Calculation cards are marked as numbers instead. Currency symbols, percent signs and commas are stripped before comparing, and you can type the card's unit after the number or leave it off (“500 kcal”, “500kcal” and “500” are the same answer), each card can set a tolerance so sensible rounding still passes, and on a percentage card 0.25 and 25% are the same answer. If you were right and were marked wrong, that is a bug worth reporting, not something to argue with.

Leaving and coming back

A session in progress is saved in your browser. Close the tab, lose signal, or reload by accident, and reopening the same session within 24 hours puts you back on the card you were on, with a line reading Picked up where you left off. The session only starts counting once you have answered five cards, so a page you opened and immediately backed out of never costs you a session from the free-tier daily allowance. Changing subject or mode starts a clean session rather than restoring the old one.

Finishing a session

When you complete the last card, a done screen summarises the session: the cards you got right, the XP earned, and any rank or league progress. On a regular session a streak panel confirms Streak safe today and nudges you to come back tomorrow. The framing is always your own forward progress: it never compares you to classmates or warns you about losing anything. Study mode still keeps your streak alive (it counts as a day's activity), but its done screen skips the celebratory streak panel, which is styled for scored sessions.

If you got any cards wrong, a Review the ones you got wrong button lets you re-attempt just those before you leave. The primary action is Done for today, because a single session a day is the habit the product is built around. A quieter One more session option is there if you want to keep going.

Community pulse: when you get a genuinely hard card right, the reveal may add a line such as Only 33% of students get this one right. It shows only after a correct answer on a card most people miss, so it always lands as a win. It is never a comparison that tells you where you rank against classmates.

On a phone: for typed cards (recall, cloze, calculation) the answer entry sits in a bar pinned above the on-screen keyboard, and after you reveal a card the Next button pins to the same bar. You never have to scroll to reach your answer field or advance to the next card. The pinned layout applies below 768px only; on wider screens the controls sit inline.

Reporting a card

If you believe a card has a wrong answer, an ambiguous prompt, a typo, or is missing a valid accepted answer, you can flag it without leaving your session. Once a card is revealed, a quiet text link reading Something wrong with this card? sits under the answer. It appears on the reveal only, not while you are still answering, so it can never be mistaken for a way out of the question.

Tapping it opens a short form with five fixed reasons: Wrong answer, Ambiguous, Typo, Out of date, Other. Pick the one that best describes the issue and the form confirms it has been sent. Reports go to the Educator content team, who review the queue and fix or retire the card. Teachers do not have a card-report screen of their own.

Reporting a card does not skip or remove it from your session. It flags it for review while allowing you to continue. If you think the card is wrong and you know the correct answer, answer what you believe is right and select the most relevant report reason.

Daily goal

Your daily goal is the number of cards a day you are aiming for. The default is 15 cards. It is also the length of a Standard session, and it is shown on the mode picker so you know what a day's work looks like.

For school students the daily goal is set by the teacher in class settings. For independent learners the default of 15 applies. It is a target to aim at, not a gate: the streak does not check it. Any completed session on a given day advances your streak, whatever its length and whatever mode it was.

Recommendation: keep the goal achievable every single day rather than heroic on good days. Research on habit formation shows that consistency, even a small amount, outperforms occasional long sessions.