The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers
Puzzle Kidz is a nice iPad app for creating jigsaw puzzles for kids. The app allows you to take pictures with your iPad and turn them into puzzles. You can also use stock images from Puzzle Kidz. The app offers three levels of puzzle difficulty to that you can create a puzzle whose difficulty isn’t too hard or too easy for your child.
Puzzle Kidz costs $0.99. It does not offer an in-app purchases or advertisements.
Stick Around is a new iPad app developed by Tony Vincent and Morris Cooke (the developer of the popular Explain Everything app). Stick Around gets its name of the sticker element of the app. The app contains educational puzzles that students solve by dragging stickers into the correct locations on the puzzles. The puzzles are essentially matching activities that can be customized by the teachers. The best aspect of the app is that teachers can create their own puzzles.
Stick Around contains eight sample puzzles. The sample puzzles can actually be played by students, but they seem to be included more as models of what teachers can create with the app. To create a puzzle in Stick Around start by selecting a puzzle format (columns, timeline, sequencing, size arrangement, Venn diagram). After choosing a format you can import a picture or draw a background for the puzzle. The puzzle is then built on top of your chosen background. Write your question and place them on the puzzle. Your answer key is created by creating stickers that your students will have to drag into place on your puzzle. The process wasn’t as intuitive as I thought it would be so I reverted to watching the built-in instructional screencast in order to understand how the puzzles came together.
Stick Around could be a great app for creating educational puzzles for your students to use as review exercises. I especially like the potential to create geography puzzles on the app.
Overall, the app has good features for students and teachers. My wish for a future enhancement is an option to give students instant feedback on puzzle completion progress. Currently, it seems that the only feedback that can be given is “puzzle correct” or “puzzle incorrect.” I would like to see students be able to get feedback like, “six of eight parts correct, correct these two parts.”
Stick Around is currently priced at $2.99.
