Make no mistake, the best way to have the most productive and confident school year ever is to pretend the previous one never ended. “Every teacher—and every parent—dreads the summer backslide,” says Erica Eichmann at Arey Jones Educational Solutions. “The good news is, there are several apps available to help kids retain the skills they learned in the previous year and help set them up for success for the ones that are coming around the bend.”
Here are five of our favorite summertime—and all-time—favorite apps.
Khan Academy does for math and science what summer reading does for everything else; it pushes people in the direction of growth. With lectures, videos, quizzes, and more, the Khan Academy app helps people improve their comprehension, round out their understanding, and give more meat to distance learning programs.
If you’ve never heard of DuoLingo, it’s probably because you’re not currently studying a foreign language; otherwise, most people learning second and third languages are already familiar with the way this amazing app turns language lessons into games. Listen, speak, and translate through the DuoLingo interface, and you’ll find yourself nearing native-speaker status. Several languages are available, and the database is growing all the time.
From language to geography to math skills, Brainscape makes flashcards in a flash. A free app with in-app purchases to customize your experience, Brainscape offers several ways for a student to recognize, name, and memorize math facts, locations, and vocabulary so that larger concepts are easier to understand and manipulate. Great for road trips, long commutes, and rainy afternoons.
For those elementary students who are sweet on everything else but math, Math Motion: Cupcake! gives math facts the spoonful of sugar kids need to make the multiplication medicine go down.
The Royal Society of Chemistry has somehow managed to create an elegant app packed with information, videos, atom models, and more for budding and passionate chemists. Users rave about its accessibility and approachability of information; by simply clicking on an element, you can learn about its natural state and real-life applications, watch podcasts and videos, and watch it interact with temperature and other elements.
And educational apps aren’t just for kids. Several of the apps and articles we listed above work just as well for adult learners as they do elementary, middle school, and high school students. It goes to show that when you pair technology with a lifelong love of learning, it doesn’t matter when school starts and stops; it only matters that you have the passion and the tools to keep growing.