Best Educational Apps for Kids

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Key Specs

• Price: Free
• Ages/Grades: 4 Years and older
• Apple/Android: Both

Why We Chose It: Suitable for beginner and advanced students, Khan Academy offers learning opportunities for students of all ages across many subjects, including math, economics, and history.

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

English language arts (ELA) seems to be one notable weakness of Khan Academy courses, though it has some work-in-progress offerings for second- to ninth-grade students. There also are no foreign language courses, though Khan Academy instruction is available in dozens of languages, with varying numbers of course offerings.

The courses include quizzes to test students’ comprehension. Khan Academy also has shifted toward developing materials in conjunction with Common Core. A junior version, Khan Academy Kids, targets young learners from toddler to five years old. It’s a mobile device app that covers math, ELA, logic, and socio-emotional learning by using books, games, songs, and videos.

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Key Specs

• Price: $10
• Ages/Grades: Ages 3–7
• Apple/Android: Both

Why We Chose It: Your toddler will love moving the shapes around in this app, and you’ll love that it’s secretly teaching them spatial recognition and object awareness.

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 learning about how objects relate to each other and how they can manipulate them.

Busy Shapes is simple to play. 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 challenge increases over time, with multiple objects and holes of different shapes. Busy Shapes costs $2.99.

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Key Specs

• Price: $10 per month
• Ages/Grades: Ages 2–8
• Apple/Android: Both

Why We Chose It: ABCmouse.com has more than 10,000 activities available to play on its app or website. There are games for traditional subjects, like math, science, and language arts, as well as art activities, songs, and puzzles.

More than just an app, ABCmouse.com is essentially a well-rounded curriculum for preschoolers. It’s designed for children aged 2 through 8 but is best for younger kids who haven’t started kindergarten.

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 isn’t cheap—it costs around $10/month. However, if your child doesn’t attend preschool, the app is a great substitute to get them ready for elementary school, as parents can track their progress.

The only reservation some reviewers, such as Common Sense Media, have with ABCmouse, 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 consumerism instead of learning for learning’s sake.

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Key Specs

• Price: Free for basic; premium memberships cost $60 to $75 per year
• Ages/Grades: Grades 1–8
• Apple/Android: Both

Why We Chose It: Prodigy helps students learn math while having fun by providing interactive games that align with the curriculum they’re learning at school.

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-based web and app game that covers math topics for kids from first through eighth grade.

Prodigy is more 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 subscription offers more features and costs about $60 annually. 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.

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Key Specs

• Price: Free
• Ages/Grades: Ages 12 and older
• Apple/Android: Both

Why We Chose It: Google’s interactive Arts and Culture lets students explore art, history, geography, and cultures from all over the world by allowing them to tour museums, learn about international foods, and much more in the palm of their hands.

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

Google Arts and Culture is an invaluable resource for tweens who are assigned research projects, as it can provide in-depth information that goes far beyond the written word to include 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.

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Key Specs

• Price: Free
• Ages/Grades: Ages 4 and older
• Apple/Android: Both

Why We Chose It: Quizlet makes it easy to prepare for tests by letting you create as many flashcard sets as you want on your phone or computer. It offers different testing methods, such as multiple choice and true/false questions, plus it has millions of sets available that students already have designed.

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 good for foreign language study, and its audio pronunciation is better than many other apps.

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.

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Key Specs

• Price: $8 per month or $80 for annual subscription
• Ages/Grades: Ages 9-11
• Apple/Android: Apple 

Why We Chose It: Ideal for beginners, Hopscotch is a great way for kids to explore the world of computer programming. Kids learn coding, problem-solving, and logical and mathematical skills while having fun creating projects.

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 built 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.