The market is flooded with educational apps, as we all know. To make things a little easier, the producers of the Infinite Thinking Machine have pinpointed five great math apps that draw kids into learning math concepts. The show features an app that teach fractions, algebra, geometry, a graphic calculator with a social feature, and a useful search tool.
Educational Apps
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¿Hablas español? There’s an App for That
By Polly Stryker
App stores are chock-a-block with apps for language learning. Most of them boast colorful flashcards and cute characters for kids, and others are translators that help travelers with phrases, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The big names are in the mix: Rosetta Stone has apps for both Android and iPhones/iPads, but they’re mobile companions to the expensive software packets that contain the main course. Berlitz sells apps to help you brush up on your vocabulary and phrases before you travel.
But a few new language learning apps are moving in on the “gamification” trend in education, making a game out of learning phrases and words. For young students accustomed to playing games during their off-hours from school, or for adults who have a few minutes to kill on the bus, these game apps are meant to help with casual, conversational language learning in languages like Spanish, Italian, French, German, Mandarin, and Portuguese.
One of the biggest players in the language-learning game app realm is MindSnacks, and as Mindy Eve Myers, Director of Education explains it, the point of the app is not necessarily to teach the language to the point of fluency, but to keep players engaged with something more productive than killing pigs.
“The reason that we wanted the games to look they way they did and to be able to be played in short bursts of time is that we wanted them to fit into those awkward moments of the day where you’ve got a couple of minutes to kill,” Myers said. “So, instead of playing Angry Birds, you can practice your Spanish vocabulary.”
Here’s how it works: You have to match the English word with the Spanish word, for example, “nine” and “nueve,” before the fish tank empties. The water drains faster and faster as numbers are thrown at you.
Another game on the menu: meteors falling to earth, with numbers or vocabulary to match before the meteor crashes into houses. Or your spelling is checked by tapping on parachutes falling to the Continue reading
Explosive Growth in Education Apps
Flickr:Flickingerbrad
By Carly Shuler, Joan Ganz Cooney Center
In 2007, when the iPhone made its debut, there was little doubt that it would revolutionize the mobile phone industry. But at the time, few imagined that it would spawn a multibillion-dollar market for mobile applications, and fewer imagined that this market might become a significant one for children.
Less than five years later, more than a quarter of all parents have downloaded apps for their children to use, according to a Common Sense Media study. Babies have achieved virtual celebrity for mistaking a magazine for a broken iPad, children now learn to “swipe” before they can tie their shoes, and tweens and teens coveted the iPad over any other gift this holiday season.
Today’s children will benefit if apps become an important force for learning and discovery. This report, iLearn II: An Analysis of the Education Category on Apple’s App Store, documents the results of an analysis of the Education category of Apple’s App Store, with the goal of understanding the market dynamics, areas of innovation, and emerging opportunities within the market for apps labeled as education. Using the original iLearn study as a benchmark for change, this updated report examines a recent sample of top-selling apps for both the iPad and the iPhone.
KEY FINDINGS
1. Apps are an important and growing medium for providing educational content to children, both in terms of their availability and popularity.
- Over 80% of the top selling paid apps in the Education category of the iTunes Store target children.
- In 2009, almost half (47%) of the top selling apps targeted preschool or elementary aged Continue reading
Awesome Apps for Science Experiments, Storytelling, Coding and More
Every month, we review some of our favorite educational apps that have been released or updated. You can find all the posts in our series here. Below you’ll find a mixture of iOS, Android and Web-based apps.
SCRIBBLE PRESS
Scribble Press is an iPad app that lets you build and illustrate your own e-books. The app offers numerous story templates and drawing tools, guiding you through the story-writing and book layout process. The books that are written with Scribble Press can be shared with others — either via Facebook or Twitter or email. They can also be posted online on the site’s gallery, although books remain private unless shared there. (iTunes link). iOS, Free.
SQUAD
Squad is a collaborative code editor. In other words, it’s a tool designed to make it easier to share and work together on programming projects. Squad’s tools can be used by both experts and learners, and the company recently launched Squad for Education, a version designed to be used with large groups in a computer lab classroom setting. Squad supports over a dozen programming languages, including HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Python, C, and C++. Web, licensing costs depend on number of students.
MINDSNACKS – LEARN CHINESE (MANDARIN)
The mobile language learning startup Mindsnacks launched its Mandarin iPhone app this month. As with all the Mindsnacks titles, the app offers various games to help learners review and boost their vocabulary knowledge. While the app is initially free, you do need to upgrade in order to unlock all 50 of the levels. Mindsnacks’ Spanish language learning app was chosen by Apple as Continue reading
Awesome New Apps for Building, Reading, X-Raying and More
A review of our favorite educational apps released or updated in the past month. (Read all of our Educational Apps series.) Below you’ll find a mixture of iOS, Android, and Web-based apps.
MINECRAFT (POCKET EDITION). We’ve written before about the educational potentials of Minecraft, the open-ended, world-building game. November marked a couple of important milestones: After being in alpha and then beta since 2009, the game had its official version 1.0 release this month. Minecraft also (finally) released an iOS app (iTunes). The “pocket edition” of Minecraft is missing a lot of the features of the PC version — there is no mining and no crafting, for example. But the main function is there: You can still build structures in an incredibly creative and fun way. (iOS, $6.99)
uTALES. Like a library card you pay for, uTales offers a subscription service for digital picture books, such as The Ugly Duckling and Aesop’s Fine Life for a Mouse. The startup offers Web and iOS apps for users to access e-books for $9.99 per month. That affords you unlimited access to the titles written and illustrated by a community of a 1,000 members. As Daniel Donahoo writes on Wired’s GeekDad blog, uTales taps into its subscriber base to help crowdsource the types of Continue reading
Great New Apps for Music, Middle School, Math, And More
Continuing our monthly Educational Apps series, here are some of the new iOS, Android, and Web-based educational apps that caught our eye this month:
THE WORMWORLD SAGA
The Wormworld Saga is an online graphic novel about Jonas Berg, a young boy who enters an alternative fantasy world through a magical painting. Author and artist Dan Lieske held a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the graphic novel’s creation, and the response was overwhelming — almost doubling Lieske’s original funding request and enabling him to focus fulltime on the project. The Wormworld Saga has been available on the Web for a while, but it entered the iTunes store (link) this month with an iPad app that’s perfect for its vision of a continuous-scrolling story. (iOS, free with in-app purchases for additional chapters)
KILL MATH
Bret Victor has collected his ideas about making math more meaningful to learners and designed Kill Math around the idea. “We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper,” he writes. “The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface.” In thinking what this new Continue reading