A card you keep getting wrong can be carried to the professor who owns that subject, with the question already asked. This one gesture is why the flashcards and the tutors are in the same app instead of two.

The problem it solves

Here is a situation every student recognises.

You're four cards into a review. One of them is the card. You've had it wrong three times this fortnight. You can recite the back of it word for word and you still could not use it in an exam, because you never understood the thing — you memorised the sentence about the thing.

What normally happens next is nothing. You tap Again, the card goes back in the pile, and in three days you get it wrong again. The flashcard system has correctly identified a gap and has no way to fill it. That is the fundamental limitation of every flashcard app ever made: a card can tell you that you don't know something. It cannot teach you.

What Heddy does instead

On the back of a graded card — right after you tap Again, where the frustration actually is — there's a way out of the review and into the tutor's room.

Tap it, and you land in the room of the professor who owns that subject, with this already sent:

Can we go deeper on this flashcard together?

Q: the front of your card A: the back of your card My hint: if the card has one The gap this was testing: if the card records one

Help me really understand this.

The professor is already replying by the time the room finishes appearing.

Why it's sent, not offered

That's the part people query, so it's worth defending: the message is sent automatically. There's no draft you review, no "edit before sending", no confirmation step.

Because the moment you most need a tutor is the moment you are least willing to write a paragraph explaining yourself to one. Asking a fed-up fourteen-year-old to compose their own question is how a good idea becomes a button nobody presses. The friction has to be zero or the gesture doesn't happen.

The same reasoning applies to what the card carries with it. If the card records the misconception it was testing — the specific wrong idea the tutor spotted when they wrote it — that travels too. The professor doesn't start from "what's confusing you?". They start from a hypothesis.

What actually travels, and what doesn't

Worth being precise here, because it's a children's app and the details matter.

Only the card's ID goes in the link. Free text is forbidden in that URL by design. The app hands over an identifier; the server looks the card up, checks you own it, checks the subject is on your plan, and assembles the message there.

It fails closed, and softly. If any of those checks don't pass, the card is quietly dropped and you still land in the room — you just arrive without it. A refusal never becomes an error page or a locked door. You get a tutor either way.

Where else you can do it

The review room is the important one, because that's where the frustration lives. But the same handover exists from three other places:

  • The deck browser, on any individual card — Study with Professor Pi →
  • The card manager, in the row menu — Ask Professor Curie to fix it (for when the card is wrong, not you)
  • A mock or exam report, per question and for a whole set — Take these to a tutor

That last one turns a bad mock into a plan instead of a mood.

The idea underneath

Most study tools are one of two things: a place to practise what you know, or a place to learn what you don't. Heddy's argument is that keeping those apart is the mistake, because the moment you discover a gap and the moment you can best fill it are the same moment — and in every other setup, they're days and two apps apart.

The carry moment closes that gap to one tap. Everything else in the flashcard system exists to produce it: the cards written by the tutor who saw you struggle, the three grading buttons, the misconception recorded on the back.

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