Flip for Knowledge: Building a Flashcard Game with HTML, CSS & JavaScript

#javascript #gamedev #criticalthinking #pseudocode

Audience: Junior developers, bootcamp grads, and anyone who loves interactive learning. ⏱️ Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Goal: Build a 10-card flashcard game from scratch, moving from pseudocode to production-ready code—explaining the why behind each step.

💡 Why Flashcards?

Flashcards are a great way to reinforce learning. They keep users engaged and help us explore:

DOM manipulation
Event listeners
Component reuse
Separation of concerns

Let’s break this down into small wins.
You can go see FunCards in Action and see the steps here.

🧾 Step 1: The Pseudocode

1. Create a container for flashcards.
2. Each flashcard has a front (question) and a back (answer).
3. Clicking a flashcard flips it.
4. Load 10 flashcards into the DOM.
5. Style the flashcards to animate the flip.

🧱 Step 2: The HTML Skeleton

<div id="flashcard-container">
  <!-- Cards will be injected here -->
</div>

🧠 Step 3: Sample Flashcard Data (in JavaScript)

const flashcards = [
  { question: "What does HTML stand for?", answer: "HyperText Markup Language" },
  { question: "What is the purpose of CSS?", answer: "To style HTML content" },
  // ... add 8 more
];

🛠️ Step 4: JavaScript to Create and Inject Flashcards

const container = document.getElementById("flashcard-container");

flashcards.forEach((card, index) => {
  const cardDiv = document.createElement("div");
  cardDiv.classList.add("card");

  cardDiv.innerHTML = `
    <div class="card-inner">
      <div class="card-front">${card.question}</div>
      <div class="card-back">${card.answer}</div>
    </div>
  `;

  cardDiv.addEventListener("click", () => {
    cardDiv.classList.toggle("flipped");
  });

  container.appendChild(cardDiv);
});

🎨 Step 5: CSS for Styling and Flip Animation

#flashcard-container {
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  gap: 20px;
  justify-content: center;
}

.card {
  width: 200px;
  height: 150px;
  perspective: 1000px;
  cursor: pointer;
}

.card-inner {
  position: relative;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  transition: transform 0.6s;
  transform-style: preserve-3d;
}

.card.flipped .card-inner {
  transform: rotateY(180deg);
}

.card-front,
.card-back {
  position: absolute;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  backface-visibility: hidden;
  padding: 20px;
  box-shadow: 0 4px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.1);
  border-radius: 10px;
  background: #fefefe;
}

.card-back {
  background: #ffefd5;
  transform: rotateY(180deg);
}

🔍 Why We Built It This Way

Componentization Even though we’re using plain JS, each card is its own mini-component.
Event Binding Shows how to handle DOM events cleanly.
Animation with CSS Keeps it performant and easy to tweak.
Separation of Data & View The flashcard content is kept separate from the DOM logic.

✅ What’s Next?

Make the game track score (quiz style).
Pull flashcards from a backend API.
Let users add their own.

🎮 Live Demo: See the Flashcard Game on CodePen

📦 Code Repo: View on GitHub

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Top comments (2)

Michael Liang • May 9

Nice post for beginners!
As a web developer, I think basics are also helpful for experienced developers for best practices.

Michael Gokey • Jun 18

Thank you. I think this is why I keep going over the basics. Once you have done as many different kinds of things over the years, it helps to teach others, a little, as a way to refresh.

I used to teach my newbies fresh from a coding bootcamp, they taught you javascript, how to code, etc. I will teach you to become a professional high quality software developer. Over time, more and more camera would be one during our meetings.