Inspire - Flash Cards

Inspire flash cards will not be the only application to break the trend of an increasing number of hours that children spend on their digital devices and it certainly has an interesting perspective on how to achieve this. In effect the application assigns a set of pre selected questions, either written by the parent/educator or supplied by the developer through their store. These flash card questions must be answered by the child, because the app temporarily suspends whatever they are currently working/playing on until they have answered the question. The importance of answering the question is also directly proportional to the number and frequency of further questions being presented.

Downloading the application was a simple and painless task and with a little help from the developer I was able to set up a parent account and assign a child account on a mobile phone. The parent section, which is best used on a desktop, launches you into a neatly rendered dashboard displaying the key performance indicators for the child, with an intuitive set of menu items on the left hand side of the screen. 

A fairly large and colourful bar chart lists the progress of your child in the subjects assigned to them, this is then broken down into a visual display of a line graph for each subject and the number of times the child has attempted the set of questions and the score of each. Clicking on an individual dot then

usefully displays the set of questions and the answers chosen by the child. A helpful date slider can drill down to a specific set of dates so that a comparison of progress can be made across time frames.

The dashboard also displays a pie chart representing the amount of time for each subject as a percentage of the whole time, this can be usefully adjusted by the parent to ensure that more time can be allocated to more important subjects or subjects that the child finds difficult to master.

The ‘Assign’ section of the programme leads you into a screen that lets the parent set a group of flash cards by subject and then by a particular workbook which is then broken down into a set of specific assignments. When the parent selects a set of assignments the questions are helpfully displayed on the screen and individual or a group of questions can be set.

The ‘Create’ section, as the label suggests, is a section where the parent can create their own set of questions within a chosen category. The ‘Limits’ section provides the parents with a set of variables to change, the ‘auto assign’ has three states, off, repeat and shuffle; a ‘time allowance’ for the use of devices; a ‘bed time’ to set a time for sleeping; a ‘lock out’ toggle either on or off, and finally a message notification, to warn or notify your child of impending events.

The store certainly provides the parent with a comprehensive range of subjects and levels to cater for the majority of needs, all of which seemed to be free of charge.

Overall the application has been well thought out and the design and content are very good, technically the programme seems to work effectively and the use of the flash cards with children will certainly achieve the developers aim of drip feeding knowledge. A useful application to put into the parent or teachers toolkit.