Today we released a new app, and it is probably not what you have come to expect from us. Hiding Spots is a brain training game, and it has an interesting story…

The game itself opens with that story, albeit embellished for popular consumption.

Once, when I was a young boy, my father showed me a series of puzzles using pen and paper. He told me that solving them induced an almost magical increase in your IQ.

The puzzles were invented by a famous Psychologist called Feuerstein, who used them to improve the intelligence of children.

My father explained the rules…

“You just have to find the square in this jumble of spots.”

“I don’t see the square.” I replied, after studying the puzzle.

“You can spin the square around.“

Then I saw it — the square was hiding in plain sight!

I was hooked. For months after, I searched endlessly for those hiding spots.

It’s designed to introduce the rules of the game, and the dialog is entirely fictional, but the kernel of the story is absolutely true.

My father is a teacher and educational researcher, and has always been excited by new developments in learning. When I was a kid, he was teaching in a school, and started to make the puzzles that form the basis of the game.

He would photocopy them, and give them out to his students. He tells me they would wait in front of the school for him to arrive just to get the latest set of puzzles. He also gave them to his own children, and we loved doing them just as much as the kids at school.

The Psychologist in the story is real too. Reuven Feuerstein used puzzles similar to the ones in Hiding Spots to improve intelligence in children who were illiterate or had special needs.

About a year ago, I remembered the puzzles, and asked my father about them. I started to make the game after hours, mainly because I thought it was a good project to learn Apple’s new Swift programming language. After a few weeks, I had a working prototype.

At that time I went to a conference, and met up with an ex-student from my app development courses, Marjan Drost, who was launching an app building business, AppBuro. Hiding Spots — back then called Dotty — seemed like a good project to have her start on, so Marjan worked on it part time for about 6 months, and the results are now there for all to see. A story that began about 35 years ago has finally reached its concluding chapter.

Drew McCormack