When it comes to revision, flashcards work well, especially with spaced repetition, but they can be very boring and stressful.

So, I made TickWords. It's like doing flashcards, but in crossword form. It’s cozy, relaxed, and built for students who are managing a high workload.

Its defining feature is the ability to scan a book, identify key concepts, and generate relevant clues. It can automatically create revision crosswords without using generative AI, so you don’t need a paid subscription or a cloud compute service.

Just some examples of your new study options:

• Load chapter 4 of your pharmacology notes, and print a crossword to do on the bus.

• Load a Shakespeare play, detect all historical words, and create a crossword to get your vocab ready before reading the text.

• Put all your coursework in, and find just the top 50 hardest to spell words.

• Scan a specification document for key facts, and get a ‘fill in the blank’ style crossword using only text extracted from the document.

• Work directly from the educational clue database: you can just pick a subject, set a difficulty level and the number of words, and then press generate.

• Don't get bogged down in jargon: load a scientific publication, and get a summary crossword of just the obscure terms used. Then do that crossword before reading the publication.

Features:

• Automated crossword creation. Supports: PDF, DOCX, ePub, HTML, Markdown, RTF, ODT, LaTeX and TXT.

• Spaced-repetition based follow-up crosswords using the same principle that makes flashcards effective.

• Generate random crosswords on any subject.

• Solve it on screen, or print it out.

• 6 hours of study music composed by Joel Steudler: 150 tracks of lo-fi, piano, acoustic, ambient and zen.

• 400+ pre-made crosswords across 38 subject areas.

• Changeable backgrounds to suit your study mood.

• A database of 2.7 million unique words and terms, with multiple clues for each: a total of 11.4 million possible clues.

• Get help when needed: letter by letter hints, and flag words you need to revisit in follow-up crosswords.

• Runs on your own computer, no AI subscription, just the one-time purchase.

I was a university lecturer for over 10 years, and created this to fill a gap in how students revise textbook content. I wanted an education focused data-mining tool for inspecting textbooks, notes, and course materials. I combined that with spaced repetition and crossword generation to offer a relaxed way to do revision.

The software is particularly well suited to terminology heavy subjects such as medicine, anatomy, law, biology, languages and geology.

Using crosswords for study is a very obvious thing to do, so why didn’t it already exist?

• General crossword creation tools can only create crosswords by choosing words from a large dictionary. Creating puzzles using only specific words is quite difficult, and most crossword generators can't do it.

• Text-mining techniques can find key terms without using generative AI, but they were not built to help students. I created new methods specifically to detect concepts worth revising.