Writing study cards

Use this before creating cards in Armin so the deck actually produces understanding, not a pile of trivia.

A card (the app calls it a "prompt") is a recurring task you give a future learner. Prompt design is task design. Most of the work is not the wording of the question — it's deciding what counts as "knowing" the material, breaking that into discrete pieces, and wiring those pieces into a prerequisite graph.

The five properties every card must satisfy

Each card you create should be:

1. Focused — one detail at a time. Long questions or answers leave parts unrecalled and make it impossible to tell whether the learner remembered everything.
2. Precise — unambiguous about what it's asking. Vague questions get vague answers.
3. Consistent — the same question produces the same answer every review. Inconsistent answers cause interference and erode memory. (The one deliberate exception: creative prompts — see reference.)
4. Tractable — almost always answerable correctly. If it's not, break it down further or add a cue.
5. Effortful — the answer must be genuinely retrieved, not trivially inferred from the wording. A cue should narrow the search, never give the answer away.

If a card is hard to keep focused/consistent/tractable, its scope is almost always too broad. Split it.

Workflow