No-frills tool to help memorise tables of data. Developed to aid studying for exams where there is a need to recall lists of facts presented in tables.
Tables of data can be configured into the application. Parts of these tables will be presented back to the user for them to enter corresponding data.
For example, consider the following list of facts:
| Vehicle | Wheels | Passengers |
|---|---|---|
| car | 4 | 4 |
| van | 4 | 2 |
| bike | 2 | 1 |
The tool will enumerate through the possible values and prompt the user to enter a corresponding value (or values). Thus, it could ask simple questions such as:
- How many wheels a bike has? 2
- What vehicle takes 4 passengers? car
Alternatively, in the case a value has multiple related values, it could ask:
- What vehicle has 4 wheels? car and van
- How many passengers in a vehicle that has 4 wheels? 4 and 2
Moreover, its possible to mark a column as only to be used as an answer. This is useful when that column is derivable from the first column directly, as in the case of acronyms. That is:
| Acronym | Meaning (Answer Only) |
|---|---|
| GIF | graphics interchange format |
| SQL | structured query language |
In this case, the only questions asked would be:
- What does GIF mean?
- What does SQL mean?
The reverse direction is not considered.
The style of asking questions about arbitrary related values in a randomised order aids building robust mental connections between values in the table. An alternative approach of repeatedly writing out the table to memorise it does not result in as robust mental map of the values (especially when trying to perform reverse look ups in the head) as typically the order of values written in the table are remembered and not the relations between the values.
The application provides basic review functionality that allows for seeing previous answers to questions. In addition, the main page uses a red/green colouring scheme of the tables to identify which tables have better accuracy in the recorded history.
These review functions are designed to help identify areas that need further revision.
SQLite is used as the underlying database. It defaults to using
~/.pymem.db as the database name. This can be changed by setting the
--database-file command line argument.
All questions asked are recorded into the database for further analysis/trends. The application does provide a table oriented review mode of the questions asked so its easy to see if the same mistakes are being made over again.
If a more detailed view of the data is needed, the data will need to
be exported manually from the database. Take a look at the
sqlitebrowser tool to export in CSV format.
Requires python3, pyuic5 available to compile the GUI and PyQt5.
The following Qt libraries are utilised: Core, GUI, Widgets, Sql.
make build
python3 setup.py installThis will install pymemorise program, normally this will be on the
path.
First, install python3 and pip3 and make sure they are on the
path. The below was tested with version 3.7.2 of Python on Windows 10.
Then perfrom the following from the repositry root:
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
gen_ui.bat
python3 setup.py installThis should install pyMemorise.exe into the standard python
location. Please check that this is on the path.
The database file created will be located in the users folder.