The lesson you just had becomes the cards you review next week, automatically, and reviewing them never costs you anything.

This is the quiet half of Heddy. The tutors get the attention; the cards are what makes the tutoring stick.

Why the tutor writes them and you don't

Card-writing is where almost every student's flashcard habit dies. Not the reviewing — the writing. It's slow, it's hard to do well, and it happens at exactly the moment you've finished studying and want to stop.

So in Heddy, the professor who just taught you writes them. Type /cards in their room and the session becomes a deck: one fact per card, the misconception you actually had recorded on the back of the relevant ones, filed under the right subject without you choosing anything.

That has a second benefit that's easy to miss. A card written by the tutor who watched you get it wrong is a card about your gap. A card you write yourself, at the end of a session, is usually a card about the thing you already understood well enough to summarise.

The schedule, in plain terms

Cards come back on a spaced-repetition schedule: get one right and it waits longer before returning; get it wrong and it comes back soon.

Two numbers are worth knowing because they're deliberately different from the tools built for adults:

Twenty a day, fixed. Not configurable. Twenty is enough to move the needle and small enough that a tired fourteen-year-old will actually finish it. A backlog you can never clear is how flashcard habits end.

Ninety days, maximum. However well you know a card, it returns within a term. Tools built for lifelong learners let intervals run to years or decades — sensible for a career, wrong for a child who has an assessment in April. Anki's default maximum is a hundred years; ours is one term.

Cards can be finished

A card you know cold, repeatedly, over months, becomes mastered and stops coming back. It isn't deleted — it's on the shelf, visible, done.

This sounds small. It isn't. Most spaced-repetition systems have no ending: the pile only ever grows, and every green day is followed by another green day forever. Giving a card an ending is the difference between revision that feels like progress and revision that feels like a treadmill.

The Atlas — cards you didn't have to earn

Not everything has to come out of a session. The Atlas is a library of ready-made decks across all seven subjects plus the main UK academic competitions, and you can adopt any of them into your own shelf on day one, before you've had a single lesson.

That matters most on the very first open, when your shelf is empty and you have nothing to review. More on the Atlas here.

What the shelf looks like

A single column, grouped by subject, each group headed by a letter monogram in that subject's colour. Not a grid of tiles — a shelf you scan down, the way you'd scan a bookcase.

Above it sits one panel that answers the only question that matters when you open the app:

  • Due: "12 cards are ready for you" · "about 4 min — little and often wins" · Start review
  • Caught up: "All caught up. Your cards rest while the spacing works — next review Thursday."

The minutes are honest, not encouraging: roughly twenty seconds a card, floored at one minute. If it says four minutes, it's four minutes.

And when a card won't go in

Sometimes a card just won't stick. You've had it wrong four times, you can recite the back of it, and you still don't understand the thing.

That's what the carry moment is for — taking that exact card back to the professor who owns it, without retyping a word of it. It's the reason the cards and the tutors live in one app instead of two, and it's the single most important gesture in the product.

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