Make Learning Stick
Stop rereading and highlighting with zero retention. Learn the counterintuitive cognitive habits that help you absorb new skills, remember what you read, and understand complex ideas faster.
Like Duolingo, but for Make Learning Stick. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Encode and Retain and Deepen and Sustain. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Make Learning Stick
- Recognizing text as familiar is passive and requires very little mental effort
- Passive familiarity feels smooth and satisfying, which people easily mistake for actual knowledge they can retrieve
- Highlighting and re-reading keep answers in front of your eyes rather than testing what is stored in your head
- Searching your own memory forces the brain to reconstruct pathways to the information
- Reading an answer directly bypasses the mental effort needed to lock that information into long-term memory
- Active recall produces much stronger long-term retention than passive review
- Looking away or closing the book removes visual cues, exposing whether the concept lives in your head
- Trying to summarize or sketch without checking reveals immediate gaps and vague assumptions
- Looking back at the text restores familiarity and hides what you cannot independently reproduce
- Mental effort and strain during recall trigger memory consolidation in the brain
- Struggling to remember feels uncomfortable, leading many learners to wrongly assume they are failing or doing it wrong
- Easy, frictionless studying usually produces shallow, short-lived retention
- Read a chunk first to grasp the central point before generating a question
- Turn that key point into a prompt or question rather than copying notes or definitions
- Keep the prompt separate from the answer so you can use it later for retrieval practice
- Cramming makes material feel familiar while you are doing it, creating an illusion of competence
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Make Learning Stick the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
You reread a chapter and it feels effortless to follow. Why can this feeling be misleading?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where Make Learning Stick takes you
- 1
Encode and Retain
- Breaking the Illusion of Knowing
- Spacing and Mixing Practice
- 2
Deepen and Sustain
- Explaining Concepts in Plain English
- Navigating Friction and Plateaus
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
Make Learning Stick is taught in the Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start Make Learning Stick today.
Download Tomo, search Make Learning Stick, and play your first lesson in under a minute.