
Mental Notes
Mental Notes are similar to traditional flashcards, but can have more than two ‘sides’ — which are called facets in Mental Case — and include visual media and audio. Each facet of a mental note should contain a small piece of information, such as a word, image, or short sentence, which can be absorbed easily in a study slideshow.
A mental note can have as many facets as you choose, and you can label each facet with a particular role. For example, you could have a simple note with just one facet, similar to a sticky, or you could make Question and Answer notes, with one facet in the role of Question, and one as Answer. You can even create multiple choice notes which have five facets: one question, a correct response, and three incorrect responses.
Some mental notes can be studied with their facets in reordered. For example, if you are learning Spanish, you might have one facet with an English word, and a second facet with the Spanish word. You need to learn what the Spanish word is that corresponds to a particular English word, but also the opposite, i.e. what the English word is for a given Spanish word. Mental Case allows you to stipulate which facets can be used as a prompt or question. In this example, stipulating that both the English and Spanish facets can be used as a prompt will mean you will see both combinations in study slideshows.
Mental Case tracks the study history of each mental note, and can schedule each note separately for study. (In fact, Mental Case actually schedules every allowed combination of facets individually.) By grading a note while you study, you indicate to Mental Case whether you knew a note well, i.e. got it ‘right’, or didn’t know it. The notes you get ‘wrong’ are scheduled to reappear more often in future so that you learn them better.
Having to add and configure facets every time you make a new mental note could get very tiresome. Mental Case allows you to save the attributes of a mental note as a template, which can be used as the basis of new notes. A template does not store any note content, but does store the configuration of each facet, including whether it can be a used as a prompt, its text formatting, and slide background color.
See also
Mental Note Topics
Facets
Creating Mental Notes
Configuring Mental Notes
Setting Facet Roles
Templates