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I built a free custom quiz and flashcards for revision using Student Spaces in Adobe Acrobat
As a student, you need digital tools that can help you not just get through exam season but also start to get ready for the next stage of life: your future career.
Outside of universities and training settings, professionals are integrating AI tools into their workflow every day, using AI-enabled tools to improve output and efficiency. For students, it’s important to have access to smart tools that support learning while simultaneously replicating the kind of systems you might need to use as part of your career.
One such tool is Student Spaces in Adobe Acrobat. Totally free for students and designed to support study skills, Student Spaces offers a range of resources including an AI tutor, options for creating study aids such as quizzes and flashcards, and even the ability to turn your notes into a podcast.
To find out how well Student Spaces performs, we cast our minds back to our own study days and mocked up some flashcards, as well as a smart study quiz. Let’s see how easy the process was and what results it gave us.
Getting started
As you might expect from Adobe, the Student Spaces home page is clean and straightforward, presenting a range of study tools and ‘curated student spaces’ (premade collections of resources) to choose from. Select the option you’re interested in and you’re ready to go – it really is as simple as that.
Creating our flashcards
Head to the Flashcards area, and you’ll be presented with a familiar sight: the AI chat interface ready for your instructions on what it should create.
Student Spaces is designed to work with your existing resources and course materials, so the trick here is to feed it some useful links that are directly related to your learning aims – you could also upload notes or other files.
We fed the AI a prompt asking for a set of flashcards about art history, and shared a link to a free journal article for it to use as research. After just a few seconds, we were presented with a set of ten cards that covered the key messages and themes from the article. Each card asks a simple revision question, and can be interacted with to reveal the answer or move on to the next question.
The cards themselves look simple, but that’s the point: we aren’t designing flashy resources but making quick and practical study aids.
That being said, there is a text editor tool that you can use to make simple edits. This includes changing the text itself if you want something phrased differently, as well as selecting a font and adding basic formatting for emphasis.
To begin with, we gave the AI free rein on how many cards to create and what aspects of the article to cover, and it defaulted to a set of ten cards covering a high-level overview of the material.
This was fine as a starting point, but if you want more tailored support then be sure to refine your prompt so that it’s clear what you’d like to focus on and how many cards you need.
We then asked the tool to make 30 more cards, and to delve deeper into the subject matter. When asked to produce a larger number of flashcards, the AI went beyond the scope of the article we provided and used its own additional knowledge to bulk out the materials.
This may be fine depending on the topic, but for more specific work make sure you share enough resources to give it a strong research base. After uploading an additional PDF to our study space, we were able to refine the cards and get a set of cards that closely matched the information.
Generating a quiz
Without much work, we were able to create a set of user-friendly flashcards that would work as a practical study tool. The next step was to see how the system fared with a more interactive quiz.
If you don’t want to start from scratch then it’s easy to create the quiz directly from the same chat window, simply by asking the AI to ‘create quiz’.
This will use the existing resources and materials that you’ve already uploaded to the study space. If needed, you can refine the prompt further and share information about what areas you’d like the quiz to focus on.
As before, it only took a few seconds before we had our multiple-choice quiz ready to go. It had the same look and feel as the flashcards and, like before, the text could be edited to add formatting or change the wording.
The menu at the top of the quiz also gave us the option to add our own additional questions, making this a very customizable tool. Other simple tools include the ability to share your creation with others and download a PDF version for offline use.
Returning to your study space
All the materials uploaded under one topic or revision session are pulled together in an individual study space, which can be accessed from the Student Spaces home page whenever needed.
You can continue to build up this study space over time, adding additional sources, making notes to capture any ideas you have and generating new study tools as and when you need it.
Moving beyond studying
We’ve focused on the tool itself today, looking at how Adobe Student Spaces works and what it can offer you.
However, the use of this type of AI software also provides a wider benefit when preparing for the professional world. In modern workplaces it has become standard practice to use AI across a range of tasks to maximize efficiency, from synthesizing information to creating resources.
Practicing with Student Spaces provides a chance to better understand how these tools work, as well as how you can get the most out of them – such as the importance of clear and specific prompting, providing reliable sources and refining output using your own expertise.
Final verdict
Our experience with Student Spaces showed that it can definitely take some of the legwork out of revision, turning existing resources into study materials in just a few clicks. It’s not a substitute for doing the learning yourself and, as we found, it’s always worth checking and refining what AI produces.
But arguably that’s part of the value, since learning how to use these tools effectively is a useful skill to set you up for your future career.
So, alongside helping you prepare for your next exam, tools like Student Spaces could also give you a head start on learning how to work with AI in the world beyond university.