The studio has a handful of features that can be randomized, allowing you to facilitate replays of your deck and add variety or additional challenges for students. You can randomize the presentation of the cards in your deck and the order of items in a container.


Randomizing the Order of an Entire Deck

The default setting for a deck is to randomize the presentation of the cards. This can be turned off in the Details menu. For mini-books and sequential lessons, you will want to turn this off. You can also enter a number of cards to hold "still" at the beginning of a deck. This is useful if you start with a mini-lesson or a "rule" card to explain something about your deck.



If the deck is non-randomized, each play of the deck will take the student through the whole deck. Keep that in mind when deciding deck length. If the deck is randomized, students will get a random selection of 20 cards each play unless you change the default number of cards per play in Details. 



The random selection will pick cards the student has seen less frequently over cards they've seen more frequently so the student will run through the entire deck before seeing repeats. This means that the first few run-throughs of a deck with many cards will be harder than later run-throughs. Keep this in mind when deciding how many cards to include in a deck. If you want materials to get progressively harder, we recommend breaking items into smaller decks and then creating a bundle showing progression (levels 1-n).


Randomizing Containers

The multi-choice and multi-picture elements are randomized by default. You can turn this off by selecting the container and changing it in the "container properties" menu on the right side of the screen.



To illustrate how this feature works, let's look at the following card. We have a simple multiple-choice question



When you play this card in the deck player, the order changes. Sometimes it may be hard to tell that the order changed because there is a chance that it can be the same as what is displayed in the Studio. If this happens, just close the preview and try it again.



We can add more objects to this randomized container or take them away. To remove objects, highlight a choice and press "backspace" to delete it. To ADD a new choice, highlight one of the existing boxes and press Ctrl + C (Cmd + C on Macs) and then Ctrl + V (Cmd + V on Macs) to copy and paste a new object into the container. It will automatically snap into the container's grid sorting system. Note that the objects in the container had their height DECREASED so that they could still fit into the existing container. If we make the container taller, the objects inside will change size.

I have created two new options and increased the height of the container. Now the height of the options is closer to the default sizes seen above.


Changing Container Properties to Create Different Layouts

You can change the style of the container grid and change its layout to fit your style or the needs of your deck. There are three options for layouts:

  • Flow: Automatically creates an alignment for the objects based on their sizes. You can adjust the size of each element individually.

  • Grid: The default setting. It sorts the choices into a grid. It sets the sizes of the choices automatically. You can select a number of columns to display your content if the default of '2' is not what you want. In the image below, I have set the number of columns to '4.'


  • Fixed: This allows you to freely change the position of the elements in the container. This setting still works with the randomization option by randomly arranging choices based on their coordinates in the container. The objects will retain the sizes you set even if they move positions. To illustrate this, let's make one of the choices bigger than the others and see how it behaves in the preview.

    Notice that the 'pink' option retains its unique size even when it moves to a different spot. This may cause it to overlap with other elements in some situations. This is something to keep in mind while making your own decks. 

Left: Studio view of the container | Right: Deck player view of the container (randomized)