Memduka

Revision, as a daily habit

Make School Stick.

A student sits down for twenty minutes at the end of the day, closes the book, and says what they remember. Memduka takes it from there — working out what came back, what didn’t, and when each idea needs asking again.

mem·DOO·ka · a coined name

Forgetting is the mechanism, not the failure

Most revision works by re-reading, which feels productive and mostly is not. Memduka works the other way round: it asks the student to retrieve the day’s material from memory with the book shut, because the effort of retrieving is what fixes it. What doesn’t come back is not a mistake to be corrected. It is the schedule, telling the app what to ask again, and when.

with Memduka without the Memduka effect Retention Time since the lesson
The steep line is what an unrevised lesson does: most of it is gone within days, which is not a failure of attention but how memory works. Retrieving it just as it starts to fade flattens the curve, and each retrieval flattens it further. The gap between the two lines is the whole of what twenty minutes an evening buys.
tonight +3 +5 +10 +21 +45 day 0 8 18 39 84 Days since the lesson · drawn to scale
Each review is set further out than the last: three days, then five, then ten, twenty-one, forty-five. An older memory gains more from a later review, so the gaps are meant to widen. One lesson is still being asked about eighty-four days later, for a few seconds at a time.

Three things, every evening

  1. Say what you remember

    Book closed. Speak it or type it — whichever is faster at the end of a long day. Memduka reads the reflection and pulls out the ideas it contains.

  2. Answer what is due

    Anything from an earlier day that has come round on the ladder gets asked again. A handful of questions, not a revision session.

  3. Teach it to someone who doesn’t know

    The last step is explaining one idea out loud to a learner who keeps asking why. Gaps show up fast when you have to make someone else understand.

The learner asks. It never corrects.

The teach-back partner is an AI that plays the student, not the teacher. It is curious, it is a little behind, and it will not tell the child the answer — because the moment it starts teaching, the child stops. Everything it says is a question.

“What if you make it really really hot, like boiling?”

Not: “Actually, enzymes denature above 40°C.” The first makes the child work out the answer. The second ends the lesson.

Parents get the truth, briefly

No leaderboards, no badges, no notification engineered to make a missed evening feel like a debt. A parent gets a short, plain account of how the week actually went and which subject is weakest — the kind of thing you could read in the time it takes to make tea.

A week, summarised

Ana has done four of five evenings this week. Chemistry is the weakest subject: six ideas from the last fortnight have not come back yet.

What the app tracks

  • Retained — came back without the book
  • Gap — due to be asked again

A gap is never marked in red. It is not a failure; it is the next thing on the schedule.

Built for the IB, ages 6 to 18

PYP, MYP and the Diploma Programme. The material comes from the student’s own lessons — what they were actually taught that day, not a generic question bank.

Memduka is in development. It is not open for general sign-up yet. If you are testing it with us, the app is at app.memduka.com.