How One Tiny Gaming Controller Became an Essential Studying Tool

Microminiature Love: Why Med Students Love 8BitDo's Micro Controller

By Nicole Carpenter | July 1, 2025 | 10:00am

Photos courtesy of Apoorva Sinha

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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.”

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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.

8BitDo Anki

It’s not entirely clear when the 8BitDo controller became popular in the Anki community, but an early reference to an 8BitDo controller—the retro gamepad, not the tiny controllers—popped up on Reddit in 2019. 8BitDo did not respond to Endless Mode’s request for comment. The first videos on YouTube were published in 2020, which is, coincidentally, when Anki blew up in online studying communities, Sinha said. That’s supported by researchers Matthew Goldman, Jamie Bryan, and Brandon Lucke-Wold, who wrote in 2024 that the COVID-19 pandemic caused “dynamic shifts” in the medical education system. “With self-learning independent of lectures on the rise prior to the pandemic, COVID-19 served as a catalyst to increase Anki popularity,” they wrote. Sinha said her community of student bloggers saw dramatic increases in popularity. “I went from 10K followers to almost 40K over just a couple months,” she said. And in 2021, she posted about using an adorable, teal 8BitDo Zero 2 controller to help her Anki studying sessions. It exploded, racking up more than 285,000 views on YouTube. It was Sinha’s fifth YouTube video, preceded by four study with me sessions. It’s still her most popular one, and, in general, one of the most popular Anki remote setup videos on YouTube. Now, there are pages of results, reviews, and how-to videos on YouTube, Reddit, and other Anki forums.

Sinha uses her 8BitDo controller (and the Anki Remote, too) to complete 500 flashcards a day—a task that can take up to an hour. Sinha explained the appeal: “Because it’s a gaming controller that we’re using as a remote, we map the keys so that instead of having to use the keyboard, I can be sitting far away from my computer, or I could be walking on the treadmill, or I could just be out on a walk and do the flashcards with my controller.”

The four circular buttons on the controller are mapped to the buttons she’d push to mark a flashcard as hard, OK, or easy. She pulled out the remote to show me, using her thumb to tap the buttons. The L and R buttons, now positioned to the left side of the controller instead of up top, are programmed as if it were her laptop’s spacebar. It’s not too hard to set up, she said, using a third-party software called Karabiner-Elements. In the years since Sinha published her video, it’s gotten even easier: There’s more software specifically for setting up gaming controllers for use with Anki. One company, Anki Remote, even created a controller of its own, building off the popularity of the 8BitDo controller. Anki Remote claims that its $50 remote has a 20 hour battery length and is designed to be more ergonomic than the 8BitDo Micro controller, with no additional setup. Anki Remote did not respond to Endless Mode’s request for comment.

Beyond the ergonomics of it all, lots of Anki users on social media describe the controller as a way to make studying feel more like a game. It’s like a mental trick, something to motivate students to study even when they don’t want to. You can gamify anything in your life—fitness, habits, jobs, even sleep. “Good gamification helps people achieve the goals that they’ve set for themselves, for one, rather than those that the creators have set for them,” game designer Adrian Hon told Psychology Today in 2023.

One TikTok user put the 8BitDo Micro controller and gamification of Anki this way: “Yes, it’s a game controller, but, more importantly, it’s a game changer for doing Anki.”