HackTX---SRS

SRS application looking to improve on existing choices by using an improved SM2 algorithm.

Spaced Repetition System is a studying system that takes advantage of the psychological "spacing effect."

It is _ not _ a recent discovery and applications taking advantage of the convenience of computers _ have _ been made.

So why start making a new one? The most popular SRS application not limiting itself to language learning or a specific language in general is Anki. No, not the Anki that makes sweet lighting cables for your iPhone.

Anki is an open-source project which happens to be the go to choice for SRS. Sadly, Anki has issues in the way it handles lessons.

Some days the user gets just too many items (flashcards) to review! Imagine studying 5 verbs for that Spanish class you are taking and getting bombarded the next day with 20 words! Where is the balance?

Anki is very strict when it comes to studying. Users study everything due at the time of studying and is allowed just that. Only got 4 terms for your Artificial Intelligence Course? Too bad, no more studying for you from that deck of cards.

** Enough about anki though, what do we have and what do we hope to accomplish? **

We looked towards implementing a better version of the SuperMemo2 algorithm. We got inspiration from a blog post, it has never been implemented, but we thought it seemed good.

We don't just give everything due on a given day, we instead opt to give the user the 10 most overdue items. An item which has been on cool down for 2 months can wait for another 3 days, but that item that had just a 5 day cool down should not be put on hold for too long.

Being more flexible with giving items to study and not giving every single item that is due allows us to balance things out and allow users to study terms a bit before they are due and to study more terms if they choose to.

We would also like to add relations between words. _ Gatito _ and _ gato _ are the same thing, why treat them like different concepts?

We set up the database and some of the functionality. We unfortunately do not have a finished demo, but we hope to turn this into a usable open-source project. Not all of our members were familiar with the libraries being used: an example being javaFx.

We hope to have something worth talking more about in the future and hopefully it can help people learn new things.

It was our first hackathon and we focused on learning, having fun, and working on a goal we thought was worthwhile.