As a private practice practitioner working with individuals in 1:1 sessions, I can never have enough social skills tools in my collection to simulate practice in group settings. When the developers at Social Skills Builder offered me an opportunity to preview and review their newest app: Perspective Taking, I gladly took them up on their generosity. Opinions expressed in this review are solely and unbiasedly mine.
Incidentally, Social Skill Builder offers FREE worksheets for a variety of social pragmatic topics. For more information, you can go to their site at this link.
When you open the app, you will see a Welcome bubble and link to 'Go' and create a profile.
Within seconds, you can create a new user by following the instructions on the screen. Once you create a profile, that name will appear in a thought bubble. If you want to delete users, you need to follow the 'Info' link in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
After selecting users, you will be navigated to a screen with four topics for play. Each topic links to specific settings in each category.
Let's take a look at the 'My Community' tab with questions about perspective taking in a restaurant. The object is to find and drag the appropriate thought bubble from the bottom of the screen to each star. Users must inference body language and expressions to consider the person's perspective. Once you select a perspective for each star, then you can check your answers by selecting 'Check Answer' located in the center of the screen. If you got all of them correct, then you get a quick visual reward and happy sound. However, if you miss one, then all the answer choices go back to the bottom of the screen and you can try again.
Here are more sample screen shots from the elementary school and the structured and unstructured middle to high school categories.
If you want to check your score, then you can find that tab in the lower right-hand corner on a sub-topic page.
Pros:
1) Good variety of settings and sub topics.
2) Nice challenge for middle and high school students.
3) Engaging way to attend to body language and facial expressions when working on using perspective.
Cons:
1) App does not identify which questions you answered incorrectly. I thought it might be a bit frustrating for clients to start over if they miss a question.
