The Atlas is Heddy's library of pre-built flashcard decks — every subject the app teaches, plus the main UK academic competitions — and every one of them is free to adopt from your very first minute.

The problem it exists to solve

A flashcard app's worst screen is the empty one.

You've downloaded it, you're briefly enthusiastic, you open the review room, and there's nothing there. To get anything to review, you have to first write cards — the slowest, least rewarding part of the whole practice, at the moment your enthusiasm is highest and your patience is shortest. That screen is where most people quit.

Heddy solves it two ways. Your tutoring sessions produce cards automatically — but that requires you to have had a session first. The Atlas covers the minute before that: adopt a deck, and you have something to review tonight.

What's in it

Decks across all seven subjects Heddy teaches — maths, English, biology, chemistry, physics, history and geography — built around the KS3 curriculum and the run-up to GCSE.

Plus decks for the main UK academic competitions: the UKMT Junior and Intermediate Maths Challenges and the other events a KS3 student can actually enter. Competition cards are a different animal from curriculum cards — they're about the recurring tricks and named results that come up year after year, not the syllabus.

What "adopt" actually means

It copies the deck into your shelf. From that moment it's yours:

  • It enters your review schedule alongside everything else
  • You can edit any card in it — fix a wording, add your own hint
  • It's grouped under its subject on your shelf like any deck you made
  • If you change your mind, put it away; nothing you've reviewed is lost

It is not a subscription to somebody else's deck that updates underneath you. It's a copy, and the copy is yours.

The honest limitation

A ready-made deck is about the subject. It isn't about you.

That's a real gap, and worth being straight about, because it's the same limitation every pre-built deck in every flashcard app has. Someone else's cards cover what a typical student needs to know. They can't know that you specifically confuse mitosis and meiosis, or that you drop the negative when both sides go through a division.

Cards about those things come from sessions with a tutor — written by the professor who watched you make the error, with the misconception recorded on the back. Those are the cards that move a grade.

So the right pattern is: Atlas first, so you start; sessions after, so you improve.

How to pick one

Two rules that make this a thirty-second decision rather than a browsing session.

Pick a subject you're doing this term. Not the one you're worst at, not the one you feel guilty about. The one with the most lessons in it, because that's where a card has the most chances to be useful before it's forgotten.

Adopt one, not six. Twenty cards a day is the daily cap, deliberately. Six decks adopted on day one produce a backlog you can't clear by Thursday, and a backlog you can't clear is how flashcard habits die. Add the second deck when the first one is comfortable.

Where it sits

At the bottom of your flashcard shelf, below the subject groups — a panel that's easy to reach and doesn't compete with your own decks. That ordering is deliberate: your own cards, from your own sessions, are the point. The Atlas is how you get started, and how you fill a subject you haven't had a lesson in yet.

Updated 10 Sep 2026. Written by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me.