How to Set Up a Procedural Collection

When you first start experimenting with procedural items of the type shown in the previous post you will not have much trouble executing these alongside your normal repetitions in your declarative collection. The reason for this is that they need few or no props. In the context of procedural learning with SuperMemo, a "prop" is anything - generally a tool, but even a place (e.g. basketball court) - that you require in order to perform a repetition. For example, for a guitar repetition, your props might be your instrument, your sheet music and your music stand, or even a chair too if you like! For a basketball repetition, you would generally require both a ball and a suitable playing field - most likely not in the study where you normally use SuperMemo. For practicing your Rubik's cube skills, all you need is the cube. And so, as you can see, almost every procedural item will need some sort of prop that you will have to get out of your seat to find. This is indeed an annoying aspect of SuperMemo's randomised repetitions of outstanding items, although it can be overcome with subset learning, which I will go into further detail on later.

For now, the first thing to do, to help manage the prop problem is to set up a separate collection dedicated to all your procedural learning. You could even go so far as to set up a separate collection for each skill you want to learn, although I don't recommend this - SuperMemo learns from you, so the more diverse items you have in your procedural collection, the better its algorithm will be able to serve you efficiently. However, if you want to experiment with learning several skills in tandem, the best way to start is by setting up a separate category for each, within your Procedural SuperMemo collection. Take note that these categories should not be defined by the skill, but by the props. So, if you want to learn a computer game as well as how to touch-type, put all these items in the same category under the simple prop title of "computer" (depending on the ease of switching back-and-forth between the game and a word-document program, you may after all still wish to have separate categories for these). Or, say you want to practice solving maths problems as well as practice sketching people - in that case a single category devoted to "pen&paper" elements would be sufficient.

The main reason for separating different skills into different categories is to avoid neutralising SuperMemo's efficient algorithm by innefficiently running around between every repetition to get the props for the next item. Instead, by studying category by category (or subset by subset) you can bring the props to the computer (or vice-versa) and run all your reps off, then move on to the next skill.

All comments are welcome