iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

Mathematics

Autodesk Digital STEAM – 5 iPad Games for Simple Physics Lessons

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Screen Shot 2013-03-29 at 7.52.28 PM Autodesk Digital STEAM Applied Mechanics is a free iPad app that contains five simple games. The games are designed to let students experiment with five connected physics concepts. The concepts in the games are energy and work, force, power, loading, and mechanisms. In each game students control one variable to see how changing that variable affects other aspects of the equation.

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The five games that students can play are Energy & Work, Forces, Power, Loading, and Mechanisms. In Energy & Work students control how much hot air is pumped into a hot air balloon as it is pushed along by the wind. Students have to manage the rate at which fuel is burned so that the balloon doesn’t run out of hot air before the end of the game. The Forces  game has players using a catapult to lob meatballs (at least that’s what they look like to me). In the Loading game students use a crane to correctly distribute weight to waiting trucks. In Power players control the thrusters of a spaceship to navigate obstacles and safely land at a destination. And in the Mechanism game students maneuver a helicopter by controlling the ration of the gears powering the rotor.

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Autodesk Digital STEAM could be a good app for introducing elementary school students to some basic physics concepts.

ShowMe Now Offers the Option to Create Class Groups

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Screen Shot 2013-03-12 at 2.59.34 PMShowMe, a very popular interactive whiteboard video creation iPad app, has added a new feature to the service. ShowMe has always allowed you to share your videos with the community of ShowMe users. Today, they added the option to create a group of ShowMe users with whom you share your videos and they in turn share with you. The groups option lets teachers create groups students with whom they share lessons. This option is a great compromise between making your video lessons public and keeping them private. The only drawback is that it does cost teachers $5/month to create and maintain groups. Students do not pay to be in a teacher’s group.  photo_48_

The ShowMe app itself is still free to use to create as many video lessons as you like. It’s a great app for creating videos for things like explaining how to solve math problems or explaining the structure of a cell.

Marble Math & iPoe – Two Good iPad Apps for Students

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Screen Shot 2013-03-08 at 12.22.43 PM Of all the apps that I have on my iPad, the one that use every day is Apps Gone Free. Every day Apps Gone Free serves up a list of five to ten paid apps that have become free for the day or longer. Today, Apps Gone Free has two apps of note for educators.

The first app to note is a mathematics app called Marble Math that I reviewed a couple of months ago. The game has students practice basic multiplication problems through a maze layout. Students are given multiplication problems to solve by rolling their marbles through mazes that contain the correct answers. Students have to avoid the incorrect answers while moving their marbles toward the correct answers. Some of the mazes contain additional obstacles to avoid while searching for the correct answer. Students earn points for each maze they solve. When they reach 2,000 points (ten-fifteen correctly solved mazes) students earn a new marble.

Screen Shot 2013-03-08 at 12.22.15 PMThe second free app of the day to note is iPoe. iPoe  features a collection of four of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The stories include the animations and sounds. You can interact with some of the featured animations. The four stories included in iPoe are The Oval Portrait, The Tell-Tale Heart, Annabel Lee, and The Masque of the Red Death. 

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Matchmatics – Math Puzzles for Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-03-01 at 11.23.12 AM Matchmatics is an iPad app that presents mathematics puzzles in the form of matchsticks laid out on a canvas. The challenge of Matchmatics is to move one matchstick to make an incorrect equation correct. Points are awarded based on how quickly you can correct the equation. The puzzles get progressively more difficult as you work through the app. Matchmatics has a timed mode and an un-timed mode. The full version of the app costs $0.99 USD. The free version of the app contains ten problems that you can try before upgrading to the full version.

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Motion Math – Math Games for iPads

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Screen Shot 2013-02-08 at 9.30.37 AMMotion Math is a developer of iPad games for kids for pre-K and elementary school students. Motion Math currently offers five iPad games. My favorite of the games is Hungry Fish.

Hungry Fish is a simple iPad game in which students have to feed a fish the numbers that the fish wants. As the game progresses students have to add numbers to feed the fish. Watch a demonstration of Hungry Fish in the video below.