How One Tiny Gaming Controller Became an Essential Studying Tool

Medical students need to remember a lot of different things. What are the symptoms of pulmonary edema? Are there drugs you shouldn’t prescribe with prednisone? How do you diagnose myocarditis? Anki can help—and often does. A 2023 study found that students that relied on the free, open-source flashcard program performed better on tests. A 2024 survey of 415 medical students reported that 86% of respondents used the app to prepare for tests and memorize terms and concepts. To put it simply, lots of medical students are using the app to remember what they’ve been taught about how to save your life.

Anki was created in 2006 by an Australian developer named Damien Elmes. (Elmes declined to comment for this story.) It uses a technique referred to as “spaced repetition,” according to the study, as a way to increase recall information. Apoorva Sinha, a medical school graduate and YouTube creator who’s studying for her medical licensing exams, told Endless Mode that reading textbooks is more of a passive way of studying. Anki is a way to practice active recall, she said. Here’s how it works: The student will load up a set of flashcards that they’ve created themselves or downloaded offline and start working through them. Say, a flashcard pops up on the screen with the prompt, a drug category with medications used to open bronchial tubes. That’s a bronchodilator. If that was easy for you to recall, you’ll mark it so. But if it was hard—either really hard, like you got it wrong, or you really had to think about it—you’d make a note of that. “If it was hard to remember, the software will show me the same flash card sooner, within the next two minutes or so,” Sinha said. “I get to see it again, familiarize myself with it, and see if I’m comfortable with it again. But if I hit easy, for example, then the software will not show me the card for another two days. When I see it in the next two days and I remember it, that’s great—then I hit easy again.”

It works to study all sorts of things, even language. But it’s really popular with medical school students.

The only problem is that using Anki from a computer isn’t too ergonomic. You’re hunched over a laptop, and your hands start cramping from hitting all the different buttons on your keyboard. If you’re studying thousands of cards a day, it becomes a real problem—and no one needs to make studying even more intense than it already is. That’s where 8BitDo comes in. 8BitDo, a third-party gaming hardware company, has become the unlikely hero for medical students, allowing them to study for long periods of time without the hand pain. 8BitDo’s tiny controllers, specifically the Zero 2 and Micro controllers, are particularly handy. The Zero 2 and Micro controllers are a fraction of the size of a regular controller. The Zero 2 weighs 20 grams, and three of them combined are still smaller than your cellphone. They’re very cute, and come in several different eye-catching colors—yellow, teal, and pink for the Zero 2. The big difference between the Zero 2 and the Micro controllers are the shape: the Zero 2 is oval shaped, while the 8BitDo Micro—still with rounded corners—is a rectangle. The 8BitDo Micro has a couple more buttons than the Zero 2, but otherwise, they’re quite similar.

Anki users don’t use the controllers like gamers; instead of holding the controllers with two hands, using thumbs to push the buttons, Anki users hold the controller vertically in one hand, using it more as a remote than a controller.