Best Educational Apps for Kids

Khan Academy is the gold standard for educational apps, particularly considering the wide range of courses it offers for students of all ages, and it’s free. Khan Academy’s YouTube videos are suitable for all grade levels and cover a range of subjects, including math, science and engineering, arts and humanities (including history and social studies), economics, AP courses, and test prep.

The courses include quizzes to test comprehension. Khan Academy also has shifted toward developing materials in conjunction with Common Core. A junior version, Khan Academy Kids, targets young learners aged two to eight. It covers math, English language arts, logic, and socio-emotional learning with e-books, games, songs, and videos.

Khan Academy is popular among students, parents, and educators because its videos are engaging and targeted at visual learners, using photos, maps, and other illustrations, and it also allows students to work at their own pace.

Busy Shapes is an app aligned with the Montessori method of self-directed, hands-on learning. As such, it’s perfect for young kids just starting to interact with technology. The app is designed to develop young children’s logic and reasoning skills by helping them explore how objects relate to each other and how they can be manipulated.

Busy Shapes is simple to play, requires no instructions, and is all child-directed. Kids drag an object into a hole—they are challenged to match the shape of the object with the corresponding hole and eventually, another object and hole will appear in a new setting. The difficulty level increases over time, with multiple objects and holes of different shapes.

More than just an app, ABCmouse.com is a well-rounded curriculum for kids ages two through eight. However, it works best for younger kids who haven’t started kindergarten yet.

It includes hundreds of interactive games, activities, and videos related to reading, math, science, and art. It’s also a multi-platform program that can be used on a computer or mobile device. 

Because it’s a full-fledged curriculum, ABCmouse.com is pricey and costs around $12.99 per month. However, if your child doesn’t attend preschool, the app is a great substitute to get them ready for elementary school. You can track your child's progress as they learn new skills and concepts.

The only reservation some reviewers, such as Common Sense Media, have with ABCmouse.com, is that it rewards children’s progress with tickets, which can be used to purchase virtual items. While this feature is sure to be successful in keeping kids using the program, some would argue it encourages extrinsic motivation instead of intrinsic motivation.

Prodigy is one of the most popular math games on the market, largely because it’s set up like a video game. It’s a fantasy-themed web and app game that covers math topics for kids from first through eighth grade.

Prodigy is designed to test kids’ knowledge rather than introduce them to math topics for the first time. Kids earn spells by answering questions correctly and get to do monster battles as they move through different fantasy worlds.

The basic app is free, but a paid premium subscriptions offers more features. The Level Up plan costs $9.95 per month or $74.95 annually, and the Ultimate membership is $14.95 per month or $99.95 a year. Despite the fact that Prodigy is widely loved by kids, one drawback for parents is that there seems to be significant pressure within the game to make in-app purchases.

A free mobile app has been developed to accompany the well-known Google Arts and Culture site, which offers a treasure trove of virtual travel and sightseeing. The app lets you search by keyword or category and read relevant editorials about the art collections. 

While Google Arts and Culture became famous for its selfie feature, which allows you to compare your face to great works of art, the site and app contain a wealth of information on museum collections, artists, theater and performing arts, historic figures, and events.

Google Arts and Culture is an invaluable resource for kids ages 12 and older who are assigned research projects, as it provides in-depth articles, images, and videos. While the app truly can be enjoyed by people of many ages, the amount of information available can be overwhelming for younger kids who may not know how to use search terms efficiently.

Self-directed study is an important skill for high schoolers, and Quizlet is one of the most effective apps on the market for reviewing material a student will be tested on. Teachers and students can create study sets/flashcards on many topics—from the periodic table to U.S. presidents to vocabulary words and more.

The Quizlet Learn feature provides different types of testing, such as true-and-false and multiple-choice questions. Quizlet is particularly useful for foreign language study, and its audio pronunciation is better than many other apps.

Quizlet has more than 500 million archived study sets already created by users, so new users can search within those to see if there is a set that matches their needs.

Note that the study sets aren’t fact-checked, so users need to be aware that they may contain errors. However, it’s a free resource, so users should weigh the benefits with the drawbacks.

Hopscotch is a coding app designed for kids 9 to 11 years old. It’s built much like Scratch, one of the first programs developed to introduce kids to computer programming, but Hopscotch is made specifically for mobile devices (only iPads and iPhones), while Scratch is web-based.

Kids can drag and drop commands and instructions into a script to create their own programs. They can customize their programs by choosing characters, save and share their creations with the Hopscotch community, and comment on and play others’ creations.

It’s a great way for kids to be creative and start learning how computer programming works without worrying about difficult, technical coding language. It’s also a good starter coding app from which kids can move on to more complex programs like Scratch on a desktop or laptop.