A high-school chemistry study app
Stop wasting brain space on polyatomic ions.
Periodic Mole drills the boring stuff into automatic recall, so your working memory has room for the actual chemistry. For students who want the basics fluent before class, not after.
Reviewed by chemistry-education researchers
- Cards
- ~75
- A day
- 10 min
- Per student
- $59
The thing nobody tells you
Remember when 7 × 8 was a thing you had to stop and figure out? You would start counting by sevens, lose track, start over. By the time you got to 56, you'd forgotten what you needed it for.
Then one day 7 × 8 = 56 just appeared. The math didn't change. Your brain did.
Chemistry works the same way. The kids who breeze through it aren't smarter; they've memorized the periodic table, the polyatomic ions, and a handful of other short lists so well they don't have to think about those parts anymore. So when the teacher hands them a problem, their brain has room left over to actually solve it.
Your working memory holds about four things at once. Every fact you haven't drilled to automatic eats one of those slots. If three slots are gone to "wait, what does that symbol mean," the fourth one doesn't carry the rest of the problem very far.
Periodic Mole is the part where 7 × 8 = 56 just appears.
What we do
Periodic Mole has one job: take the ~75 facts that show up in every high-school chemistry unit and burn them into long-term memory using spaced repetition. The science behind it (Bjork, Roediger) is the same approach medical students use to memorize 4,000 drugs.
Spaced Repetition
Short daily sessions. The algorithm picks what you are closest to forgetting. Ten minutes a day is enough.
Open →
Catalyst
Chemistry trivia with category names like Electron Stealers and Full-Shell Eight. You pick up the property of every family while playing.
Open →
Plus Build-a-Molecule, where you construct compounds with the rules of enforced under your fingertips, because reading about CH₄ and building CH₄ are not the same skill.
For the elements where the symbol fights the name. The symbol comes from an older word for the element (Latin for Pb and Ag, German for W), which is why "Pb" looks nothing like "lead." You think the phrase. The word rides along with it.
- Pbfrom Latinplumbum
Plumber Pete and the Lead Balloon
→ recalls Lead
- Agfrom Latinargentum
Argentina's Silver Tango
→ recalls Silver
- Wfrom Germanwolfram
Wolverine the Tungsten Warrior
→ recalls Tungsten
What it isn't / what it is
It isn't
- A chemistry textbook with badges glued on.
- A thousand low-quality flashcards farmed off Quizlet.
- A subscription that auto-renews when you forget to cancel.
It is
- 75 carefully authored cards covering the facts that show up most in high-school chemistry.
- Reviewed by chemistry-education researchers.
- Built for the standard high-school course; AP and IB students welcome.
For parents
If chemistry is rough on your kid, intelligence and effort are probably not the reason. High school chemistry is built on memorization most kids never finish, and the textbook assumes they did.
Periodic Mole gives them ten minutes of daily practice that compounds. By unit two, they're working on actual reasoning instead of trying to remember what nitrate is.
Built for high-school chemistry. No data sold. No ads. One payment, no subscription.
30 days to decide.
$59 for the school year, $79 for two. Full access, every game and every concept page. If it isn't working inside 30 days, email us and we refund. No forms, no exit survey, no questions about how much they used it.