The stackz computer representation

Visual representation

The Stackz color concept is visualized on the computer screen as shown in the picture below.

Lesson
A lesson is represented by a horizontal graphical element with a name on the left side and five levels as a horizontal row of stacks. The height of a stack indicates the number of entries in the corresponding level, and the colors of the entries are set accordingly to the current ColorMode (or uninitialized). This representation gives a quick overview over the proficiency state. The entries on the left side are unknown and the ones on the right side are known, and the dark entries are "bad" in the sense of the currently set ColorMode.

Stack
The entries in a stack are sorted according to the current color mode, the dark entries (i.e. "bad" in the sense of the current ColorMode) are placed on top. This shows the order in which the test and learn tools process the cards of a stack - the tools process the cards in the order of decreasing difficulty, by picking the cards from top of the stack.

The Stackz 2005 file options allow to configure the system to process the cards of the selected stacks in random order, ignoring the difficulty of a card. With this setting, the entries in the stacks are displayed as unsorted, as shown in the image below.

Operations
When a new lesson is created, all entries are entered to the initial level, typically the neutral level (cf Leitner/Stackz promotion system). The TestDialog can then be used to do a first separation of the words that are already known from the unknown ones. After that, the content of the color-stacks on the left side must be learnt. The LearnDialog is ideal for this purpose. There is a third dialog, called MatchDialog. It is a form of quiz that offers a different approach to the vocabulary content. All of these dialogs potentially declare a card as known (move to the right) or as unknown (move to the left).

Handling