Otsimo | Special Education

What is Otsimo Special Education?

Otsimo Special Education is an educational game application developed for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or learning difficulties. Children with autism are intended to be taught the basic knowledge through assistive games designed under the guidance of child psychologists and educators to providing them homeschool education.

Otsimo provides the necessary ABA education through games designed for kids with attention deficit and speech problems. Let’s discuss a little more about this wonderful solution.

What we like about Otsimo?

When I was asked to review Otsimo Special Education I had no hesitation in doing so. We have been using Otsimo at our ASD school for nearly a year and our teachers will agree that it is one of the most comprehensive SEN apps around. The majority of our teachers and therapists are using the app on a daily basis.

Engaging, motivating and empowering! Otsimo has the capability to demonstrate progress like no other app we have used. What we enjoy most about it is that the content enables us to generalize outside the app into everyday situations. Most activities that we do on a daily basis can be supported by the games on the app and vice versa. Generalization can be difficult for many people on the autism spectrum so increased opportunities to support this are key. Having a special education app that helps with this is fantastic.

Otsimo Special Education contains 13 areas with over 80 activities or stories, all motivating and engaging. Whatever the area of need that you require to be addressed, Otsimo will have an activity that will help. Each area has a different focus allowing you to align your lessons accordingly.

The following areas are available

• Core Skills
• Daily Life
• Numbers
• Vocabulary
• Reading & Writing
• Communication
• Puzzle
• Geometric Shapes
• Household Goods
• Video Modeling
• Jigsaw
• Music
• Stories (Social Stories)

The AAC features are similar to Proloquo2go, which is high praise indeed, quick to use and super responsive. Teachers can quickly switch between games and model language in the communication area. I can’t think of any application that can do the similar.

The Stories section presents you with 6 Social Story style narratives that will aid with those difficult times and social breakdowns. It would be great if the developer will continue to add to this section. Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) is the main approach used throughout allowing for fast feedback and motivating tasks in each game. A nice reward feature with stickers to collect along the journey is also available.

Considering the size of this app, it is not found wanting in terms of performance. Quick to load and reliable, children will not get frustrated by slowness or glitches. Each interface is not overly busy and you are able to configure for sounds and colour in the family section which is password protected. Also in the family section is a wonderful and informative blog with numerous articles and advice from people in the know (please keep adding articles)! 

A reporting section allows you to track the progress of your child or student on their journey. This is really useful to share between home and school so everybody knows what has been worked on and how long has been spent in each area. Overall, Otsimo-Special Education is the complete special education application. It is unfair to label Otsimo as one app. More appropriately, it is one app containing lots and lots of apps. For what it offers, pricing is extremely generous and great value for money and we are looking forward to trying the School & Classroom app. The developers at Otsimo have created something very special and no classroom should be without it. Well done Otsimo!

Also read: Autism Apps

You can download Otsimo | Special Education on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the Otsimo | Special Education app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.