Is there a way to have multiple "fronts" to a card?

Card Design
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Sometimes I want to learn a general concept instead of a specific fact.

For instance, suppose I want to learn the “power rule” from calculus. I’ll make a card asking what the power rule is, or asking how to take the derivative of something taken to a power.

But I also want to actually practice doing it.

I might make some flash cards that have specific “take the derivative of this power of x” problems. But I don’t want to memorize the answers to the problem, so that when the card comes up, I immediately know what the answer is, from the last time I solved it. I want to forget the details of the problem, and be reviewing the more abstract thing of how to solve this kind of problem.

So what would be great is if I could make a card that had 10 different power-rule problems, and every time the card comes up in my review, it randomly selects one of those problems to practice.

(I could make a different card for each problem, but I want anki to be tracking my level of comfort for all problems of this type: if solving one problem like this was easy, I want it to wait a longer time before it shows me another one like it.)

Or to take another example: Suppose that I want to study body language in anki. The front of a card has a short video clip of someone displaying a behavioral cue, and the back says what that cue means.

I don’t want to overfit to the specific video specific clip, so that as soon as I see the first frame, I remember what was about. I want to learn to recognize that cue in a bunch of different contexts and variations.

So it would be great if I could make a card that had 10 short video clips of the behavioral cue, and when that card comes up, one of them is randomly selected to play. That way I don’t learn a connection between that particular video and the meaning, I learn the connection between a cue, in a bunch of contexts, and the meaning.

Is there a standard way to do this, to make a card that has several “fronts”, only one of which is randomly selected? Maybe there an addon for something like this?

2

A similar sort of problem arises when learning languages.

I think that in future it would be neat to have the ability to hook an AI engine into constructing the question to ask to test a particular fact. Maybe not quite there yet, but I doubt the day is so far off so I hope that being able to have some sort of question generator when a card is displayed gets added as a feature request for future Anki versions.

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What you describe requires some template scripting or add-ons, but it’s not very complicated to do. Maybe if you post a sample card someone will help implement the idea.

1 Like
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Ok, I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, is there documentation for how to do this somewhere?

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You can persist javascript state from the frontside to the backside: GitHub - SimonLammer/anki-persistence: Persist data between both sides of an anki flashcard.

I haven’t done this myself, but at least for simple problems it should be possible to generate constrained problems randomly, then dynamically calculate the solution on the backside.

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