Smartphone, our new learning tool

If Facebook is the household name that represents mainstream social gateway, Twitter presents itself as the medium for an open exchange of information. The 140 character limit on tweets is a brilliant product feature for millennial who have grown accustomed to instant and constant gratification that the digital era promises.

Aside to disseminating and acquiring information, Twitter being the public platform it is, I have also gotten used to making new acquaintances in the Twitter-verse, mainly professionals with shared interest which in my case, individuals who are into technology and business related news and content.

Over the holidays, I came across the profile of the CEO and Founder of Brainscape, Andrew Cohen. His company, Brainscape which is marketed as an “intelligent mobile education platform” piqued my interest.

I am a big fan of online and mobile based product with specific focus on training and education. Naturally, Lumosity (games designed by neuroscientists to challenge your brain) and Duolingo (free language-learning and crowd-sourced text translation platform started by computer and data scientists) topped the list of my favourites.

Hence, when I learned about Brainscape I promptly looked it up on the Internet and the App Store. The product is said to help accelerates your learning speed through smart flashcards and a combination of proven cognitive science. So, I decided to give it a try.

Brainscape breaks subjects down into bite-sized building blocks cater to individual learning needs. Free to download from the App Store (with the option for in-app purchase), the app allows one to practice or revise lessons in the same manner as traditional flashcards but with the additional flair that a well designed and executed digital learning experience offers.

During my trial with Brainscape I downloaded Learn French and Learn Chinese (two separate apps). My initial impression for both? I was truly impressed.

The flashcard method works for reinforcing my mastery in basic French.

In the process, I am prompted with “how well did you know this” to rate how confident I am in the mastery of a term or phrase. If I rated lower, the word would resurface in the deck of flashcards until I am confident enough to move on to learn new vocabulary.

The product is built on the basis of “the more times you review a concept, the stronger will be your memory of it” — strengthens and trains our brain to be more responsive in retrieving a piece of information whenever necessary.

From the point of view of a native Mandarin speaker, the app is useful for users who would like to master the basics of Chinese pronunciation (pinyin), characters and picking up useful phrases.

I am particularly blown away by the feature that offers learners opportunity to master the fundamentals of writing Chinese characters.

It tends to get a little tricky for anyone interested to master writing Chinese characters, as each character is formed by a number of basic stroke types and each stroke is to be written in accordance to the correct order. Brainscape’s Learn Chinese app offers 42 decks of flashcards with step by step guidance to mastering Chinese “Stroke Order” at the cost of USD19.99.

A worthy investment for the serious learners, if I may add.

I have yet to explore the product in its entirety but based on my initial impression, Brainscape is a quality product with its unique approach and design. It is a great example of how educational apps should be developed and executed in modern-day classroom.