When you’re studying something that needs a lot of memorization, like learning a language, prepping for a tough biology exam, or mastering all those pesky built-in Python functions, it’s hard to beat a good old deck of flashcards. It’s the tried and true method of getting tough subjects to stick to your grey matter - especially when you’re on a deadline, and you’ve really got to get this stuff down or you are going to flunk most heinously tomorrow, dude!

But like many old fashioned methods, flashcards can be kind of a pain! You have to spend ages writing them all out on paper, and then somebody knocks them off the table and one goes under the fridge, and then your buddy asks to borrow them but you’re not finished and you’re not going to make him a whole other deck, are you kidding, and now the edges have gotten all bent so they don’t shuffle well any more, and then once you’ve finally gotten everything memorized there’s nothing to do but toss them all out and get started on the next deck. The results may be good, but the process? Frustrating.

Enter the MagTag!

With CircuitPython, you can type out your flashcards in JSON, and you’ll never be stuck writing and shuffling huge decks of index cards again. You can sort them by chapters, support lots of different international fonts, even share them with your slacker buddy with a simple copy-paste. Maybe not the most old-fashioned anymore, but it’s e-paper, so we’re pretty sure it still counts.

Thanks to Unicode font support in CircuitPython, you can quickly and easily make text for any language using free fonts!

Parts

The MagTag starter kit comes with a battery and some magnets included. You'll also need to grab a USB C cable separately, if you don't have one:

Alternatively, you can get the parts individually, if you'd like to swap out the battery or omit the magnets.