iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

STEM

Explain 3D for iPad – Visual Explanations of Machines and Systems

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Screen Shot 2014-10-24 at 10.48.19 AM A few years ago Explain 3D launched as a website to showcase 3D animations of simple machines. Later the site expanded to include 3D animations of elements of the universe. This week Explain 3D launched a new iPad app for the same purpose as the website.

Explain 3D’s iPad app includes the same animations that you can find on the website. The animations allow viewers to zoom-in, zoom-out, and rotate animations 360 degrees. Students can manipulate animations of simple machines like elevators and hand pumps. The app also offers models and animations of space shuttles and the International Space Station. To help students learn about electricity Explain 3D offers 3D models nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and hydro-electric dams.

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Explain 3D could be a good source of models to include as part of a larger lesson that you’re constructing for your students to view online. To get the most out of the models your students will probably need you to explain what is happening and or the connections to the larger lesson.

Scratch Jr is Now Available as an iPad app

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Screen Shot 2014-07-30 at 10.54.21 PM Scratch Jr, the popular programming environment for kids, is now available as an iPad app. Scratch Jr for iPad uses the same drag and drop programming principles used in Scratch. On Scratch Jr students can program multimedia stories and games.

To program a story or game on Scratch Jr students select background settings for each frame of the story. Then in each frame students select the actions that they want their characters to take. Students snap programming pieces together to make characters move and talk in their stories and games.

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Scratch offers a great way to introduce students to programming and logic. Scratch Jr for iPad makes it easy to introduce those same concepts to elementary school students.

H/T to Danny Nicholson.

Modio – Design 3D Robots for Printing

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modio Modio is a new and free iPad app that anyone can use to design model robots for 3D printing. The app features a large collection of robot parts that you snap together to design your 3D robot model. You can mix and match parts to heart’s content. Modio provides a visualization screen that will reveal the dimensions of your model before you print it. Included with those dimensions is an estimate of the time it will take to print the model.

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I tried Modio this morning and found the model robot design interface to be intuitive and easy to use. The downloading and printing options were not quite as easy to figure out. The download and print options are found by tapping the little model robot icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen that you see while constructing a model. You will probably have to reserve some time for teaching students the intricacies of printing options.