I had great luck going through a new deck I made to visualize the periodic table. I talk a little bit about design in the description. Hope other people can find this useful!
ankiweb.net/shared/info/922797769Posted Aug 14, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC
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ankiweb.net
Cool! I made cards with the order, but it was a quick and dirty thing made with clozeoverlapper. I will give this a go. Have you considered learning the classes as well? That isn't too bad.
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Classes, like alkalis and such? No, but I think it would be easy to tack on. Most are just a matter of associating a name with a period or group, so you might be better off drawing a table and prompting for a highlighted region, or asking for a representative element from that group, rather than tacking on another 236 cards to map elements to classes and back. Metalloids might be the hardest part to remember since they don't correspond to a period or group, but it looks like there's some dispute about where to draw the line on them, or you could prompt for those elements around the borders if there's a specific classification you want to remember.
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I learnt these explicitly using another deck. It wasn't too hard.
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This is so cool!
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thanks!
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Really cool idea. I came up with a similar solution in which I Image Occluded each 118 elements in the periodic table to learn their positions but I like the idea of asking the question of what element lies next to this one.
Once you get to know them really well, would be cool to do the diagonals too. Sometimes, I practise traversing the periodic table along some random path.
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What does this look/feel like in your head?
Do you have a sense of where the elements are on the table?
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I feel like my understanding of the table is definitely better than it was when I started the deck. If someone mentions an element name in a book or in conversation then I can at the very least recall the other elements in the group and period without effort, even though I might not have the exact order in my mind. With a bit more concentration, maybe with a few seconds of thought, I can recall the elements that are directly adjacent, unless it's something obvious like C/N/O/F, in which case it's straight forward. The same goes for recalling elements by number. There actually was one time this ability came up naturally in conversation, where I was able to recall an element name given a number that was mentioned, but it took me a few seconds. I think speed of recall could be improved if I started marking cards wrong if they're not completed in under a certain amount of time, but doing so is more effort than I want to put in and I'm satisfied with what I've gained already.
If I get into gear I can sort of "swim" through the table, traverse it in my head, but it's definitely not as easy as it would be to "walk" through it, if that makes sense. On that note, I thought it might be interesting to make a video game to practice these kinds of memorization problem, sort of like a dungeon crawler, but one where the rooms are elements on the table, there's some level of difficultly when traversing rooms (for instance, a random enemy encounter per room) and you're tasked with doing fetch quests between the rooms in a way that integrates SRS. Writing this is more effort than I want to invest for now unless there could be some way to generalize it to other problems. Maybe like, "construct a dungeon given an arbitrary graph/category/table"
There are some things I've found more interesting now that I can reference the table in my head. For instance, I was watching a youtube video about some environmental disaster where they listed the heavy metals that were found in the soil. I think previously this would have been a sort of laundry list of things that I would have glossed over completely, but this time I could see in my head where they were on the table and pick out patterns with them. Another time, I was listening to an audiobook while driving and there was a chapter that made heavy reference to elements on the table, and I think it was easier to follow along with what he was saying without having to go back and repeat parts.
My recall isn't perfect, and now that the deck is starting to test for long term recall I'm finding there are more holes in my memory than there were right after completing my initial review. Certain patches trip me up. One common problem is group misalignment between blocks, so for instance I might miss that Zinc is across from Gallium, or Nobelium is across from Lawrencium. Another common problem is off by one errors when doing number lookup, so for instance I was embarrassed recently when I thought calcium was 21 when it was actually 20. Then there are those elements that sound alike, for instance I always get the positions for thulium and thalium mixed up and I have yet to find a satisfying mneumonic to converge on.
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I had trouble with Thulium and Thallium until I found out the following:
Thulium is named after Thule, an Ancient Greek place name associated with Scandinavia or Iceland. It is next to erbium and ytterbium, which are named after Ytterby in Sweden.
Thallium means "green twig", after its spectral lines.
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Interesting! That might work then. Ultima Thule was the working name for the kuiper belt object that Nasa visited, and I know that shares the same namesake, so it shouldn't be too hard to keep that association in mind. Thank you!
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I did this slowly for the first few weeks, then a few days ago I decided to binge the rest.
Reviews are a bit high, got 100 scheduled for tomorrow. Looking forward to it settling down.
Great deck, thanks for this!
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Welcome, heh, and good luck! It's been a pleasure talking with you about the deck. I went the opposite direction, I bumped down the adjacency deck to 10 new per day, with the other two decks each at 5 new per day, but you might have better luck if you can dedicate the time.
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Atomic numbers are a nightmare to learn, any tips?
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Yes, I did find something. After flailing about for a while, I picked up a tendency to focus on elements whose atomic numbers are divisible by 5. Once I was comfortable recalling those, I could use them as landmarks to jog my memory when learning numbers for adjacent elements, since I'd already learned the adjacencies. This was especially useful towards the end of the deck where the elements start to get a little "same-y". So for instance I know Holmium is 67 since it's two after Terbium, which I know is 65. In concept maybe it would be better for the flashcard deck to introduce these landmarks before any of the other elements, but the deck has worked so well for me I'm not sure I want to mess around with it more.
There were other tricks I tried too, for instance I tried mneumonic pegs (things like "titanium nanny" or "iron nacho"), and those were funny for a while but I had trouble creating clear distinction between the elements ("was it zinc moose or copper moose? can't remember")
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I've had moderate success with the Periodic table memory pegs deck. It's at least been better than nothing, although it's still sometimes difficult.
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I just recently ran out of new cards in a deck that's just every possible permutation of number, name, and symbol (though it stopped at 109 and I haven't filled in the missing ones yet). This is a more interesting idea that I might add in as a complement to those cards - giving a better idea of the structure of the table, not just those matches.
Of course, none of this is of any actual use to me, but I enjoy it nonetheless.
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FYI you have a typo in scandium
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Thanks for catching that, will you guys see it if I fix my own deck or do you know if that requires reupload?
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I’m not sure how deck updates work either, especially if users have already started studying cards in it. But I’ve seen some community-driven decks on this subreddit that I think are hosted on GitHub
As for me, I just manually edited the cards containing scandium as they come up (there should only be four right?)
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there should only be four right
Right, four in "Groups and Periods", and the other decks have two each in case anyone's using those as well.
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This is the first deck I've put together that I truly consider a success. It's over 800 cards and took about 2 months for me to go over enough to feel confident about what I've learned.
Learning the periodic table has been on my bucket list of things to do since high school. I've tried memorizing it now and then using different methods: first with rote recitation, then with mneumonic pegs, and finally with spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is really the only method that's worked for me, and I think the techniques I acquired in making this deck will help towards creating others in the future.
There are two other decks that accompany this one, for atomic symbols and numbers. I have no plans to study atomic weights since I think that may be too much trivia for my interests, but the scripts are available on github in case others want to create their own.
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Yeah, I was that weird kid in high school that memorized digits of pi. It's mostly just a personal challenge. I've worked professionally in computer modeling and there have been a few times where I've felt I've lagged behind in chemistry, but there's never been anything to directly motivate me to learn this. However I guess if I was under the gun to learn it I would probably be too stressed to do it anyways, so I guess that means now's the best time to learn it?
Obviously having teachers force it on students is kinda stupid. I get the idea of wanting to empower students and show them they're capable of doing something of that magnitude, but if there's no ambition to do it to begin with then it's only going to breed resentment.
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Hopefully you can get still get value out of an experience like that, you demonstrated you can do something like it if there is something you find useful or interesting, and you've got at least one technique that works for learning up to that point (hopefully one that isn't too painful of course, otherwise I guess it helps eliminate one of the wrong ways to learn, heh)