Your lectures, turned into ten minutes a day.
Bathcards reads the slides and readings on your unit's Moodle page, writes flashcards from them, and tells you what to study today. It runs on your own laptop, and your course material never leaves it.
Free while in beta. Windows and macOS. University of Bath students.
The problem
Revision apps do not know what you are studying.
Every flashcard app asks you to write the cards. That is the part that does not happen in week four. The decks that do exist are someone else's syllabus at someone else's university, and the generic ones answer questions your examiner will not ask.
Your unit's Moodle page already holds the exact material you will be assessed on. Bathcards starts there.
How it works
Three steps, then it runs itself.
-
Collect a unit
Open your unit on Moodle and click the Bathcards extension. It lists the lectures, slides and readings on the page. You tick what you want.
-
Make cards
Bathcards reads what you ticked and writes cards from it - questions about the actual content of the actual lecture, with the slide they came from recorded against each one. You see the cost before anything runs.
-
Open it tomorrow
Today gives you a plan sized in minutes: what is due, what is new, which unit needs it most. No deck to choose, no settings to set.
Inside
What you actually get.
About 11 minutes. Streak: 12 days.
A plan, not a pile
You set a goal in minutes. Today decides what fills it, mixing what is due with a rationed trickle of new cards so no single day becomes unmanageable.
Assessed by coursework 40%, exam 60%.
It knows your degree
Bathcards holds the university's own unit catalogue, so it knows which units you are taking, when they run and how each one is assessed - and shows you how ready you are for each.
Why does a competitive inhibitor raise the apparent Kₘ but leave Vₘₐₓ unchanged?
It competes for the free enzyme, so more substrate is needed to reach half-maximal rate; saturating substrate still outcompetes it entirely.
From: Lecture 4, slide 12 - your unit's Moodle page
Cards that cite their source
Every card records the lecture and slide it came from, so you can check it, and so revising a card sends you back to the material rather than away from it.
Reading
Mark up a paper. Keep the thinking.
Open a PDF or a lecture deck inside Bathcards and highlight it as you read, with your notes down the side. Highlights are yours, stored with the document, and they are the best material there is for cards - because they are the bits you already decided mattered.
It is also the thing the owner uses it for most: taking notes during the lecture itself, in the app, on the actual slides.
Notes (3)
"the effect persisted after washout" - so not simple occupancy. Ask about this.
p. 4, results
Control here is the unexposed passage - that is what makes the comparison mean anything.
p. 6, methods
Your data
It runs on your laptop, not on a server.
Bathcards is a program you install, not an account you sign into. Your cards, your progress, your highlights and your lecturers' material all live in a folder on your own machine. There is no copy of your course on anyone else's computer.
Writing a card needs a model, and that is the one thing that leaves: when you ask for cards from a lecture, the text of that one lecture is sent to be turned into cards, and is not kept. It is not used for training, not pooled with anyone else's, and nothing else - no cards, no answers, no progress, no highlights - is ever sent anywhere.
Read the full privacy notice, which names every field that is stored and where.
Try it on one unit.
Set-up is a download and about five minutes. Free during the beta.
Questions
Who is it for?
University of Bath students, on a laptop running Windows or macOS, using Chrome. It is built around Bath's Moodle and Bath's unit catalogue, so it will not do anything useful at another university yet.
Does it work on my phone?
No. Bathcards runs on your own machine, which is what keeps your material on it, and that rules out a phone for now. It is a laptop program.
What does it cost?
Nothing during the beta. Making cards costs real money in model usage - a few pence a lecture - and that is being paid centrally for now. The app shows you the cost of a batch before it runs, so nothing happens without you agreeing to it.
Is it allowed to read my unit's Moodle page?
The extension only ever sees the Moodle page you are looking at, when you click it. It does not run in the background, does not follow you around, and cannot reach anything you could not already open yourself. Everything it collects is stored on your laptop, for you, which is the same thing as downloading the slides by hand.
What happens to my cards if I stop using it?
They stay in a folder on your laptop as plain files, which you can read, copy and export. Nothing is held hostage by an account, because there is no account.
Who is building this?
A final-year Biochemistry student at Bath, who wanted it to exist and is user number one. If something is wrong or missing, there is a feedback box in the app and it is read by a person.