Help and FAQs

Yes. Peekabout is designed for parents and children to use together, and we've deliberately left out every mechanism that usually worries parents about kids' apps. There's no in-app chat, no user-generated content, no social features, no ads, and no third-party tracking. There's no account, no profile, no login. Each child's age is sent as a bare integer (only the number 7, not 'Alfie, 7, lives in Oxford') so the hunt can be calibrated for them, and nothing else about them is sent anywhere. The parent holds the phone and reads the clues aloud. The children explore the real world. That's the whole interaction.

Yes. Peekabout uses AI (specifically Anthropic's Claude) to generate hunts. When you tap 'generate', your phone sends a small amount of information to our server. That's the biome you picked, the weather, how long you want the walk to be, each child's age as a bare number, and any free-text notes you typed. The server also knows the current month so spring hunts get spring quarry, and that's it. Our server passes that to Claude, Claude writes a hunt, and it comes back to your phone in a few seconds.

We don't send any identifying information. No names or photos. No location data or device IDs. No account, because there is no account. Peekabout has no way to know who you are, where you live, or which children are yours. The generated hunts are not used to train any AI model, and Anthropic's API keeps customer API traffic out of training data by default.

We're plain about using AI because pretending otherwise would be daft. What parents actually care about is that each hunt is fresh, locally flavoured, and calibrated to your kids, and that's what the AI is doing.

Yes. Peekabout generates its hunts from the biome and weather you pick, plus the season worked out from today's date, not from where your phone thinks you are. Set 'Woodland' and 'Sunny' and you'll get a usable hunt whether you're in Sherwood Forest, Yosemite, or a pine forest in the Pyrenees.

The flavour is strongest in temperate habitats in the UK, North America, and northern Europe, because those are what the item library is built around. Tropical beaches, alpine forests, and desert walks still work, but expect them to feel slightly less specific than a walk in the New Forest would. Free-text notes (typing 'Provence', 'Adirondacks', or 'Big Sur' into the setup screen) nudge the hunt in the right direction.

Nothing bad, which is part of the design. There's no penalty for not finding something, no guilt-trip, no failure screen. Items you don't find stay on the list to spot next time, and a lot of families end up with 'the one we always mean to find' running as a quiet joke for weeks.

Some items are genuinely easier than others, and Peekabout calibrates roughly to your kids' ages, but weather and luck matter too. You might not see a red kite on a Tuesday that happens to be windy. You might not find a toadstool in a wood that's been raked. 'We'll come back for that one' is a perfectly good way to end a hunt, and a good reason to open Peekabout again next Saturday.

Explorer is the default mode and the way most families use Peekabout. You walk at your own pace, spot things in any order you like, and tick them off as you find them. There's a timer running in the background, but it's just for interest and record keeping, not for pressure, so you end up with a nice 'we did this one in 37 minutes today' afterwards. Good for mixed-age groups, for pre-readers who need their grown-ups to read aloud, and for families who want to dawdle.

Challenge turns the same hunt into a proper race against the clock, with per-item times and a personal best to beat. Older hunters who like competition tend to love it.

One thing worth knowing either way: how long a hunt takes depends on how fast your hunters are. If they're ripping through the list you might want to hold back the next item for a beat, and if they've already finished with plenty of walk still to go, start another hunt mid-walk. Nothing stops you running two hunts on a single outing.

You pick a duration preset at setup. Short is about 30 to 60 minutes with 8 to 10 items, meant for a shorter stroll or a loop round the park. Medium is 60 to 90 minutes with 10 to 12 items, which suits most family walks. Long is 90 minutes or more with 14 to 16 items, for proper weekend expeditions. There's also a Custom option where you pick the item count yourself (anywhere from 4 to 20).

These are estimates, not stopwatches. The real answer depends on how quickly your hunters spot things. Some afternoons you finish in half the time, other walks you stretch it out. If they're tearing through the list faster than you expected, start a second hunt mid-walk. Nothing stops you running two or three in one outing.

Yes, and set the weather to Rainy at setup so the hunt adapts to what's actually there. Rain changes everything you can find on a walk. Worms come up, puddles form, slugs and snails appear, cobwebs get beaded with droplets, and if you're lucky you catch a rainbow. Peekabout leans into that instead of pretending it's a sunny day.

Most walks with kids involve rain at some point. It's part of the deal, and a good rain hunt is honestly one of the most memorable family walks you'll do. Boots, waterproofs, a rainy-day scavenger hunt. That's the setup.

No, walking isn't the only option. Any activity where you're moving through an environment can become a Peekabout hunt. Tell Peekabout you're on a bike ride by typing 'on a bike' or 'cycling' into the free-text notes field at setup, and it'll customise the hunt to make it easier to spot things on the move. Bigger landmarks, bolder colours, things above eye level, sounds that carry. The same trick works for a scoot, a child in a pushchair or stroller, or a kid on a scooter. If you're moving too fast to actually see, slow the pace down rather than the hunt.

Not necessarily better. It's the same core idea, but generated live for today's walk instead of printed three summers ago. Printables are brilliant if you've got a printer handy, a free morning, and a walk that matches whichever season the PDF was written for. There are lovely free ones from the Woodland Trust, Crafts on Sea, the National Park Service, and your local library. Your kids' school probably sent one home in a book bag at some point.

The gap Peekabout fills is the live bit. A printable from July is no use in November. A printable for 'nature walk' is generic where the real walk is specifically a shingle shore in the rain at 4pm. Peekabout writes the list for this walk, in this weather, at your hunters' current ages, and does it on a phone you're already carrying. You don't need a printer and you don't need to remember to pack the sheet.

Both are fine tools. Peekabout is the one you can start using in the ten seconds between putting boots on and walking out the door.

Yes, and it's one of the sneakily best ways to use it. Pick 'Urban' as the biome and Peekabout builds a hunt around the sort of things that are actually there on a town walk. Moss in pavement cracks, a pigeon on a rooftop, the name on a park bench, ivy climbing a wall, the tree outside the shop, a cat in a window, a leaf stuck in a gutter. The ten-minute school run becomes a small hunt. The walk to pick up milk becomes a small hunt. It turns a functional trip into the kind of walk the hunters actually ask to go on.

Seven primary biomes, each with sub-types for more precision. Woodland covers dense old-growth woods, light managed woodland, and conifer plantations. Park includes urban parks, country estates, playground-adjacent spaces, and botanical gardens. Shore is sandy beaches, shingle, rocky rockpool, clifftop coast paths, and estuary shoreline. Countryside is farmland, hedgerow lanes, and open meadows. Urban covers town centres, residential streets, canal towpaths, and industrial or dockside walks. Riverside is streams and brooks, river paths, and lakesides or reservoirs. Moorland and heath covers open moor, heathland, and wetland edges.

If your walk doesn't quite fit, there's a free-text notes field where you can type something more specific, like 'Durdle Door clifftop', 'Central Park reservoir loop', or 'Yosemite Valley floor', and the hunt adjusts around that.