Find the matching silhouette
Tap the matching shadow
| Look at the picture | Study the shape at the top. |
| Tap a shadow | Choose the silhouette that matches. |
Shadow Match shows you a picture and a row of black silhouettes, and asks which shadow belongs to it. It sounds trivial to an adult, and that is rather the point: for a small child, matching an object to its outline is a real piece of visual reasoning that takes practice.
What the game is actually training is the ability to recognise something by shape alone, stripped of colour and detail. That is a foundational visual skill, and it appears in early-years education for exactly this reason. Here it just looks like a quick tapping game with twelve rounds.
Look at the overall outline first, not the details. The silhouette keeps only the shape, so features like colour and pattern are no help. Encourage a child to trace the edge with their eyes or their finger.
Check the tricky parts: ears, tails, wings and handles. When two shadows look similar at a glance, the difference is almost always in one small protrusion at the edge.
Take it slowly at first. There is no reward for speed here, and a child who studies each shape properly learns far more than one who guesses quickly and moves on.
Say the shape out loud together. Describing what makes the outline distinctive, like a long neck or pointed ears, turns a silent matching task into a conversation and makes the reasoning explicit.
Twelve per round, so a session takes only a couple of minutes.
From around three upward. It needs no reading and no counting, only looking.
You lose a life. Run out and the round ends, but there is no penalty beyond trying again.
Recognising objects by outline alone, which is a standard early-years visual reasoning skill.
Nothing at all. The whole of Shadow Match is built into the page itself, which is why there is no loading bar and no waiting before you can play.