Seek vs. Questagame

I’m curious about the differences between Seek and Questagame. Has anyone used both of them? Would you use them in different contexts? They seem somewhat similar from the descriptions in terms for making observing species a game with challenges and achievements and stuff.

Also testing out Seek today made me sort of wish cultivated plants contributed to the computer vision, just because there’s not a lot of other easy plants around right now to look at! It did do better than I expected with them though.

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QG collects observations, whereas Seek does not. Seek adds a slight game experience, but QG goes full-on game experience. Both concepts have their place in the “market”. QG is worth having a look. I found it to be just too much extra work and complexity to do what I wanted to achieve with iNat, but that would be what you want in a challenging game!

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Your might want to check out QuestaGame’s new schools program, which launches April 8:

https://questagame.com/schools

We’ve tried several school programs over the last two years, and this QGame-based competition model, using 25 member “teams/clans” for each class (as opposed to a separate app) seems to work best so far.

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Neat, are there mechanisms to deal with the systemic ‘duress user’ problems the main site has? This could be one solution if so

I do hope Seek is also trained on cultivated plants. Students are first going to point the app at cultivated plants in and around their campus. In my own early hours with Seek here on Pohnpei I am finding that Seek has difficulty identifying the eclectic mix of plants that are found on this island - a mix of common global tropical introductions along with native and indigenous plants. I could not see a way to suggest a species when using Seek, forgive me if I missed that feature, but the ability to help the app narrow down an identification might help especially with students old enough to understand scientific names. The use of Seek might help resolve the issue of students who use iNaturalist in a class and then become inactive users with effectively abandoned observations. As a college instructor I need something like an “advanced mode” capability in Seek to use with my students.

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i tried Seek on the houseplants in my office and it did well.

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I too have been finding it working well on the cultivated plants in my garden. The key factor is whether there is sufficient observations of those plants in iNaturalist to have adequately trained Seek’s AI on. We found with the Penang bioblitz that the AI struggled with many of their cultivated and wild plants, simply because it was an area that had no volume of observations for the AI to work with, so it was picking up North American and European species etc as the nearest image match. We strike it here in NZ too, for taxa that haven’t been observed often.

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