Spot the difference

Remember the frustration of hunting down that last difference in a spot-the-difference drawing while you were a kid? These days, children get their daily dose of frustration through “impossible games”, like Flappy Bird, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring back this golden oldie.

As we often do, we worked with a couple of early test customers to figure out how we could take this classic game to the next level.

Images don’t have to be nearly identical

With the Spot The Difference widget, you can work with images or pictures that aren’t nearly identical, or images that are mirror images of each other, because you can position the spots on each image independently. For instance, a typical spot-the-difference image looks something like this:

A typical spot-the-difference image: both images are nearly identical, except for some small details. Fun, but not much to learn here.

This is nice for a game, but it very much limits how you can use this in an educational setting. With the Spot The Difference widget, you can instead ask students to compare the Gothic and the Roman architectural styles, using images like this:

Ah, much more useful!

Adding pop ups for an extra level of learning

Another great feature of the Spot The Difference widget is this: you can show pop up text boxes when a student finds a difference. In this pop up, you can add text and images to provide more context on the difference.

For instance, you could ask students to find the differences between an African and an Asian elephant, and explain that the trunk of an African elephant has 2 fingers, while the Asian elephant only has one:

Pop up text boxes add an extra level of learning

Can you find the differences between an African and an Asian elephant? Test yourself in the fun widget below:

How to create a spot-the-difference activity for tablets

I hope you’ll find the process of creating your own Spot The Difference widget straightforward. If not, the video below should help:


If you don’t have a BookWidgets license yet, head over to our getting started page and start your free, 30-day trial today.

Attribution

Image of the Gothic church shared by TTaylor under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
Image of the Roman church shared by Grapher78 under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Niels Vanspauwen

Join hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and get the best content on technology in education.

BookWidgets enables teachers to create fun and interactive lessons for tablets, smartphones, and computers.

Choose from over 40 exercise templates (quizzes, crosswords, jigsaw puzzles, ...), and adapt them with your own content.