Card types7 / 9
In this guide
Card types
Image Occlusion
Hide-and-reveal regions of an image.
What & why
Image Occlusion is fill-in-the-blank for pictures. You take one image, cover parts of it, and the learner reveals and names each hidden region. It’s the strongest type for anything you learn by location — where a part sits, not just what it’s called.
When it beats Basic
Reach for it when position is the knowledge: anatomy diagrams, a map’s countries or capitals, the parts of a machine, the sections of a chart. Because the answer is tied to a spot in the image, it can’t lean on surrounding words the way a text cloze can — the learner really has to know where things are.
One base image can hold several occluded regions, so a single well-chosen diagram becomes a set of review cards — handy, but keep an eye on how many that produces (the same “one note, several cards” effect as Cloze).
A good fit: a diagram of the human heart with each chamber and vessel hidden — the learner reveals and names them one at a time.
Every image still has to be one you’re allowed to share, with its source recorded — see media & licensing.
In the editor
Upload the base image, then draw the masks right on it: pick Box, Ellipse, or Polygon and drag over the area to hide (for a polygon, click each corner and double-click to close). Give every mask the label the learner should recall, and an optional hint shown on reveal.
Choose a reveal mode:
- Hide all, reveal one — every region is masked and the card asks for one at a time (the target is highlighted). Best when the surrounding parts would give the answer away.
- Hide one — only the target is masked; the rest of the image stays visible. Best when context is fair game.
Each region becomes its own review card. To ask for several masks together — the lobes of one structure, say — give them the same group and they study as a single card. When you first study a multi-region image, the siblings are held back to the next day so you don’t see the same picture five times in a row.