Firecracker has introduced a new way to add control to your workflow. For students who like to quiz themselves on active recall questions directly from topic pages, we now arm you with more choices for how to review those questions. A menu is now available for you to choose questions based on those you have never seen, or based on how those questions relate your rated level of confidence with that answer. Boom.

So...we've almost made it to the end of 2017. It's been an interesting year, for everyone. Through December 31st, we're having our hoiday sale on Firecracker:

1 year of Firecracker for $150

18 months of Firecracker for $200

2 years of Firecracker for $250 ... and more.

Same retention, fewer daily questions.

You know that Firecracker's Daily Review tasks are driven by an algorithm that we relaunched back in July 2015 and have been improving steadily ever since, based on user data and student outcomes.

Over the past couple of years, Firecracker members from all walks of life have asked us to build out native app functionality for just about every device. Since our membership keeps us moving, we've taken a page out of The Who's songbook and decided that we're Going Mobile. You can now download the Firecracker Daily Review mobile app for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, as well as for Apple Watch, totally free! Firecracker Daily Review parallels our website's interface and feature set, allows you to make progress on your studies while offline, and synchronizes with our website. In addition to the offline functionality, our mobile app also features popular new functionalities including Night Mode, High Yield Mode and Read-to-Me. We have received some really rave reviews thus far, and I've chosen a few of my favorites from the App Store and Google Play to showcase here:

So much stuff to mark. So many ways to mark it. Students ask all the time what each of the different mark types (i.e. Urgent, Current, and Past) mean, when they should use each, and when (if ever) they should move a learned topic from one to another. So allow me to quickly clarify exactly how you should approach marking topics.

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of a completely revamped and upgraded way for you to take notes in Firecracker MD and Firecracker DO. Up until now, all of your notes were buried at the bottom of the related topic summaries, and didn’t exist at all in the daily review sessions. We’ve fixed both of these issues by introducing an annotation-style editor (a la Google docs or articles on Medium) which can be used to highlight the exact phrases and concepts you want to attach notes to. In addition, this highlighting tool can also be used to give us direct feedback on any concepts you run into that seem unclear or inaccurate.

When we launched Firecracker MD and Firecracker DO in August, we planned to release dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android devices shortly after.  Unfortunately, we ran into two delays and we want to give everyone an update on our mobile apps as we know how important they are to you.

A full demonstration of our new Firecracker DO platform.

Over the last ten years, residency placements have become increasingly more competitive, due in large part to the progressive rise in the number of students entering medical school without an equally appreciable increase in the number of residency slots. In 2015, for example, roughly 41,000 applicants vied for only 30,000 positions. In response, residency programs are universally raising the bar on the level of student competency they’re requiring for admission, resulting in a greater emphasis on objective board scores as a way to screen candidates.