Peek and Seek

Visual discrimination skills, while narrow in themselves, are the bedrock for a whole array of learning and understanding.  That being so, children who appear to have not developed these skills far enough should be given the opportunity to rectify this.  This is where Peek and Seek comes in.  Some apps have a broad focus across whole subjects, others drill down into a topic within a subject, but Peek and Seek concentrates on these narrow but vitally important visual skills.

The graphical items which form the basis of the activities within the app are very well selected for the tasks.  They each fall within one of a few different themes, such as robots, bugs, animals, butterfly wings and footwear.  The colour choices ensure that children with limited colour perception can still carry out the tasks - even in greyscale, each object is clearly distinct from the others.

The consistent style and geometrical design of the objects ensures that there is enough similarity to make the challenge real, but their details and shapes offer enough reference points to make identification possible with careful consideration.  This is the case even in the tasks where the challenge is formed by the partial obscuring of the object.

There are eight different challenges within the app each of which covers a different combination of visual perception abilities.  What to do is explained by a short spoken instruction - reading skills do not need to have been developed to use this app. The activities themselves are designed to be pressure free.  There is no time limit or scoring and there are no lives to be lost.  A wrong selection prevents onwards progress but otherwise has no ill effect.  This being the case, the app is perfectly suited to being used by a child supported by an adult where the adult provides guidance, models thinking processes, and offers praise.

Once a fixed number of questions have been answered, the questions end and the player can return to the main menu to select a new task or repeat the current one.  App users are used to more feedback when a play experience ends and the lack of a conclusive end, other than no more questions, feels a little strange but it is part of the no-pressure approach that the app has chosen to follow. 

How you feel about the apps quite passive structure will depend on your own tastes and on how you wish to utilise the app with your child or children.

Teachers who work directly with children needing to work on the skills covered in this app will appreciate that they can control the pace of the app and that using it with more than one child is perfectly simple.  Parents may feel that they'd prefer an app that did more to encourage children to use it independently by offering more feedback and defined goals.

Essentially, both parents and teachers should ask themselves whether the app's purpose is a good match for their children.  The app's developers say that it  "is designed to promote visual discrimination skills in young and special needs children" and it does a fine job of this.  Parents and teachers who identify that their children could use some help with developing these skills will find the app a useful one.  Gameplay challenges can be provided by other software but the skills challenged here with a pinpoint focus are not covered in many other apps.  For those children who need it, this is a great app.