Problem Deck Plugin (Pdeck)

Plugins
#1

What is Problem Deck plugin?

Problem Deck (pdeck) is a TiddlyWiki plugin designed to help you create, organize, and use a curated “deck” of problem-solving questions, tailored for efficient study and review. Whether you’re preparing for university exams or honing your problem-solving skills, pdeck provides a flexible, easy-to-use system to manage questions and answers in a modular, accessible way.

Problem Deck organizes exam questions into structured, searchable decks with tagging for easy retrieval by topic, difficulty, or course.

Tutorials

The Pdeck Tutorial is the starting point to learn more about plugin features, help, demo and examples. See below for online pages.

Code and demo

History

2025.05.09

  • Release 0.3.0
  • [NEW] New item from sidebar generate right question number
  • [NEW] Question template has its own icon now
  • [NEW] Settings in More sidebar tab
  • [NEW] Searchbox for pdeck sidebar tabs like Question, Exam, Topic

There is currently minimal documentation available. I intend to complete this section gradually as soon as I have some free time.

Reference

Detailed Description

Problem Deck (pdeck) is a plugin designed to help you create and manage a structured notebook of exam questions and answers — ideal for students, educators, or anyone practicing problem-solving.

Purpose:

  • To provide a flexible system for storing course-specific exam questions along with their answers, enabling efficient study, review, and reuse.

Tools:

  • Built on TiddlyWiki and works well with plugins like Refnotes, KaTeX (for math rendering), Shiraz (visual enhancements), Commander (batch operation), Section-Editor (rich editing), and Autocomplete (enhanced input experience).

Core Features:

  • Each question is stored in its own tiddler tagged with Question. You can easily navigate from a question to its corresponding answer using a link at the bottom of the question tiddler. If no answer exists yet, clicking the link automatically creates a new, properly titled Answer tiddler linked back to the original question.

  • Answers are also stored as separate tiddlers tagged with Answer, allowing full use of TiddlyWiki features such as tagging, fields, filtering, and transclusion. This ensures your deck remains modular, searchable, and easy to maintain.

Additional features include:

  • Topic categorization with clickable links (using pipe-separated values)
  • Customizable sorting of questions within exams
  • Sidebar tabs for Questions, Topics, and Exams
  • Keyboard shortcuts and autocomplete support (if plugins are enabled)

With Problem Deck, you get a powerful, wiki-native solution that grows with your needs — from a few practice problems to a complete exam-prep system.

3 Likes
How can I Create virtual tiddler adding a prefix/suffix from a template
#2

This is good, I remember I create problem deck (we call it wrong test question book) in Evernote in 2013 and get good result when gaokao (National College Entrance Examination) and get to ShanghaiTech university smoothly.
There was no spaced-repeation, and I didn’t read it again very much. I think even only the procedural of recording the problem deck will help remember things. I was wanted to recommended you add tidme plugin with it, but after this thought I think it is not necessarly.

1 Like
#3

Thank you @linonetwo.

At its core, PDeck is designed to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical problem-solving in engineering education. The main idea was to create a problem-solving “deck” that not only presents challenges but also fosters a deeper understanding of underlying concepts, rationale, and integrated learning workflows. I believe this approach aligns well with the goals of problem-based learning (PBL), where the focus is on cultivating critical thinking and applied reasoning. Thus, I believe that space repetition and tools primarily designed for memorization are not the most efficient approach here, as PDeck emphasizes conceptual understanding and applied problem-solving over rote learning.

#4

Interesting. I’m trying to get some pbl training at the moment!

#5

Yours looks like it might be a more organised solution to my current slightly ad hoc approach (Engineer's Text Book — A Hyperlinked Guide For Engineers).

So, how does the answer title relate to the question title? Does it have to be the same title with a Q and an A at the start? Would there be possibility to reference multi part/ tiddler answers?

You can see an example of my current Question/ Answer setup here:

1 Like
#6

I use numbering with title, so, Q001: Fixed bed reactor question has the answer tiddler like: A001: Fixed bed reactor

For multi-part answer tiddler, I use an answer tiddler like above and then use section editor with se-type: my filter.
But without the section editor you may want to have a $list widget in answer tiddler to aggregate all parts. You may use A001: Fixed bed reactor/p01, A001: Fixed bed reactor/p02, A001: Fixed bed reactor/p03, …

1 Like
#7

I see some of your questions have a desc field. Where is that used/ viewable or was it an idea which has been discarded?

#8

I like that I can have a tighter integration between topics and questions. It can be tricky in my current implementation to find something, however…

Could you change the topic template to place information at the bottom of the tiddler after any pre-existing content? Currently placed at the top.

Or just a little more vertical space and a ___ line and leave it at the top. That might work. But maybe with a lot of questions in a topic that wouldn’t be ideal.

At the end before my other templates kick in…I currently place the templates manually at the end but it’s on my to do list to set it up to just apply them to tagged tiddlers.

Or maybe a modal/ pop up?

Two existing tiddlers tagged topic.

Don’t really want the question info at the bottom of velocity for example, but not sure I’d want five or six questions listed as the first thing in the tiddler.

I’ll stop updating this post now. Promise.

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#9

I believed that every Question Tiddler is essentially a Tiddler, meaning all the features applicable to a general Tiddler can also utilized in a Question Tiddler. This serves as example of such reasoning.

#10

Dou mean the statistics? Well it is a matter of taste! It comes from viewtemplate and you can simply manipulate the list-after and list-before fields and put it where you like.

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#11

Check here in style tiddler:

.kk-pdeck-topic-stat {
    display: flex
;
    flex-direction: column;
    float: right;
}

and it to see where it fits your requirements.

These comes from viewtemplate, feel free to put theme where you like! These are a matter of tase!
You can hide them.

In real work, I use Problem Deck with Mehregan, where I can add notes, todos and keywords to Question tiddlers.

#12

The statistics and the question list when viewed in a topic containing information.

If the topic is purely for the question list that’s fine, but if the topic has some in information in then I’m not sure it looks good, or is desirable to have a list of questions before the text. I’m not sure WHERE you might put the questions. I like that they are there, as it makes the whole thing hang together more. I think I might be pushing this in an unintended direction from your original ‘just an exam question repository’ by wanting ALL MY STUFF IN ONE BIG WIKI approach :slight_smile:

At the risk of overcomplicating things, perhaps the statistics sit to the left and the question list is revealed by clicking on ‘Questions’

Click on the http://hwh.stephenteacher.com/txtbook.html#SUVAT and see what you think about the formatting. (you’re much better at making TW pages look better than me!)

#13

I’ll have a tinker tomorrow.

#14

That’s true! When creating a new exam, I select questions from various topics. To simplify this, I use a Topic Tiddler to easily pick questions from a specific topic. On the other hand, each Question Tiddler lists all exams where it has been used, with the most recent exam displayed first.

#15

Feel free to hack, or create a new flavor of pdeck and share it with us!