At the Toronto Wildlife Centre, rehabilitators use four-letter acronyms to identify species quickly. Learning 260+ of these codes by heart is no easy feat, so we built a tool to help.
The Problem
New volunteers often struggle to memorize the shorthand codes used in patient records. AMRO is American Robin, BCCH is Black-capped Chickadee, EGSQ is Eastern Grey Squirrel — and the list goes on for hundreds of species.
Our Approach
We built a single-page flashcard app with a few key learning features:
- Spaced repetition weighting — missed cards show up more often
- Tiered difficulty — start with the 25 most common species and unlock harder tiers as you improve
- Species images fetched from Wikipedia’s API to build visual associations
- Conservation status badges so you learn more than just the acronym
Technical Details
The entire app is a single HTML file with no external dependencies — pure vanilla JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. This makes it extremely portable: just open the file in any browser and start learning.
Images are loaded dynamically using the Wikipedia REST API with the species’ scientific name as the query. There’s a 3-second timeout with a graceful fallback if images aren’t available.
Try It Out
You can play the Wildlife Flashcards right here on our site. We’d love to hear your feedback!