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In today’s digital age, educational games have become an essential tool for children’s learning and development. These interactive experiences not only make learning enjoyable, but they also help reinforce academic concepts in innovative ways. Whether it’s through refining math skills, exploring creativity, or understanding emotional intelligence, educational apps are bridging gaps and opening new worlds for young learners. This guide explores some of the best educational games available, focusing on apps for math, coding, science, social learning, and reading. We’ll delve into the research behind these apps, identify standout examples, and give parents the confidence to choose the right tools for their child’s unique learning journey. By examining leading apps like Bedtime Math, Lightbot, ScratchJr, and Epic, this comprehensive review sheds light on how such tools can positively impact children and support parents in enriching their offspring’s learning experience.
The research
In a world growing increasingly reliant on technology, understanding the value and impact of educational games is crucial. Recent studies emphasize the positive role these games can play in learning and development. Children engaged with educational games often show improved memory, enhanced problem-solving skills, and increased attention spans. These games effectively integrate learning into play, making knowledge acquisition a more enjoyable and less daunting prospect. Moreover, games are intentionally designed for specific cognitive processes, such as spatial awareness and logical reasoning. This intentional design helps developers create categories of games that target different learning areas—be it math, coding, or science. The ultimate goal is not just to educate, but to foster a genuinely engaging experience that encourages repeated use and in-depth exploration. Parental involvement also plays a significant role. When parents monitor and participate in gameplay, it bridges the gap between traditional learning and modern technology-enhanced methods. It allows parents to better understand new educational formats, enabling them to guide their children through different educational paths using these apps.
Our favorite math apps
Math apps have revolutionized how children learn numerical concepts. These interactive games combine vibrant graphics with engaging challenges to make math fun and approachable. Through storylines and gamification, math concepts feel less like a chore and more like adventure.
A family math app: Bedtime Math
Bedtime Math offers an exceptional approach to learning. By integrating family dynamics into math exercises, this app encourages families to engage in math together through bedtime activities. Stories from everyday life serve as the backdrop for math challenges, inviting children and parents to solve problems collaboratively. Studies show children who regularly interact with math in family settings tend to have a stronger grasp of math concepts. Bedtime Math capitalizes on the power of storytelling to connect with children on an emotional level, making math an integral part of their routine.
Bedtime Math (iOS and Android)
Available on both iOS and Android, Bedtime Math offers a seamless user experience. It boasts a diverse range of problems suitable for a wide age group. The app features daily math challenges that cater to children’s varied skill levels, growing progressively in difficulty to ensure continued growth and engagement. The app’s approachable interface and captivating premise keep math sessions short and impactful. This approach helps maintain a child’s attention and interest over time, making learning a rewarding experience.
Bringing math home
Bringing math into daily life has become more accessible with the help of revolutionary apps that blend education and entertainment. These tools make complex concepts digestible, encouraging children to embrace mathematics.
Apps for visual math: DragonBox Numbers and DragonBox Big Numbers
DragonBox educates using visual interactions. These apps are designed to develop a child’s number sense through engaging scenarios, enhancing their understanding of mathematics in relatable contexts. The DragonBox series incorporates puzzles and sequences to teach math skills intuitively. Designed to build a solid foundation in numeracy, DragonBox encourages children to explore rather than simply memorize. This method ensures that learners understand the logic behind calculations and develop long-term skills.
DragonBox Numbers (iOS, Android, and Amazon)
DragonBox Numbers turns learning into a playful banter of characters—referred to as Nooms—combining arithmetic with storytelling. Each challenge links to a concept that reinforces the understanding of numbers and arithmetic operations. The app is adaptable across platforms, ensuring a broad reach to its audience. By offering scalable challenges, it caters to different sets of abilities, providing an ideal starting point for young learners.
Visual numeracy
For children visualizing abstract mathematical concepts can sometimes be a challenge. However, creative apps like DragonBox Big Numbers provide clarity through immersive content.
DragonBox Big Numbers (iOS, Android, and Amazon)
A sequel to DragonBox Numbers, this version delves deeper into complex arithmetic. DragonBox Big Numbers helps children grapple with higher-order math skills through engaging puzzles and tasks designed to challenge their understanding comprehensively. With its eye-catching graphics and captivating characters, the app holds a child’s attention while they venture through new learning dimensions. The intuitive setup ensures that they practice math at their own pace without the intimidation often associated with learning more advanced concepts.
More-complex arithmetic
Apps that tackle complex arithmetic offer new avenues of exploration for children ready to progress beyond basic arithmetic. DragonBox Big Numbers exemplifies this approach, inviting learners to tackle bigger numerical challenges with ease and excitement. Within this digital realm, children manage transactions, solve resource management puzzles, and conduct strategic planning, ensuring the skills they develop are applicable in real-world contexts. This way, arithmetic becomes more than a mere academic subject; it becomes an everyday life skill.
Our favorite coding apps
Coding is becoming an essential skill for future generations. It teaches logical reasoning, creativity, and problem-solving, equipping children for diverse career paths in the digital world. Coding apps designed for kids transform these complex skills into engaging games that captivate young minds.
Coding puzzles for beginners: Lightbot and Lightbot Jr
Lightbot apps present coding puzzles in a beginner-friendly format. They focus on two fundamental coding concepts: sequencing and loops. By solving puzzles, children learn algorithmic thinking—a skill critical to successful coding. These apps offer engaging challenges that enhance not only coding skills but also promote resilience as children navigate through puzzles.
Lightbot (iOS and Amazon)
Lightbot is available for iOS and Amazon platforms and caters to older kids with more complex puzzles. It covers deeper computing concepts and progressively increases in difficulty, encouraging continuous learner growth. The game is designed to encourage strategic thinking. As users progress, they must devise more sophisticated solutions to guide the robot, helping solidify fundamental programming concepts.
Coding puzzles
For beginners, comprehending programming logic is facilitated through engaging problem-solving apps like Lightbot, which uses the metaphor of guiding a robot to make these abstract concepts accessible and fun. Homework in disguise, Lightbot builds a foundation of logical reasoning through trial and error, ensuring that kids view coding not as a daunting task but as an exciting endeavor.
Lightbot Jr (iOS and Amazon)
Lightbot Jr offers a simpler introduction to coding for younger children. Available on iOS and Amazon, this version includes elementary puzzles teaching foundational coding concepts through straightforward instructions. Designed specifically with younger audiences in mind, the app utilizes simpler commands to simulate coding without overwhelming young learners, thus serving as a gateway to programming education.
Coding puzzles for younger kids
For young minds ready to explore coding, Lightbot Jr provides an ideal introduction. This version ensures that even the youngest digital natives learn at their own pace in a supportive environment. With patterns resembling playful gaming mechanics, kids can relate real-world actions to coding, building a bridge from everyday play to educational discoveries.
A creative coding app: ScratchJr
ScratchJr is notable for introducing children to coding through creativity. By enabling users to create their own stories and animations, it combines art with programming, making code accessible through fun, visual storytelling. Its open-ended play empowers children to think like innovators, translating ideas into interactive programs. This nurtures a child’s innate creativity while simultaneously instilling essential coding skills.
ScratchJr (iOS, Android, and Amazon)
This versatile app is available on iOS, Android, and Amazon, allowing for widespread access and enabling kids with diverse devices to create and share their imaginative stories. Developed by MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group, ScratchJr employs a block-based interface ideal for young learners, minimizing the intimidation often associated with coding syntax.
Visual programming
By demystifying coding and making it more relatable, apps like ScratchJr tap into the creative side of programming. Tailored for pre-readers, children can drag and drop blocks of code without needing to read, making technology approachable. Through designing their storylines and characters, kids develop early programming literacy, fostering independent play and exploration while learning planning and sequencing skills.
An app for hands-on coding: Osmo Coding Awbie
Osmo Coding Awbie focuses on hands-on, interactive experiences that blend tactile learning with digital feedback. It features a charming character named Awbie, taking children on an adventure driven by coding commands. Osmo’s unique approach to tangible coding involves physical blocks representing coding commands, encouraging children to manipulate them to control Awbie’s actions on the accompanying app screen.
Osmo Coding Starter Kit for iPhone & iPad
The Osmo Coding Starter Kit introduces kids to core coding concepts through the use of magnetic blocks that snap together to form commands. It is specially designed for iOS devices, blending digital gameplay with physical interaction. The synergy of physical blocks and digital interactions enables kids to grasp coding principles in a hands-on context. This tactile approach caters to a variety of learning styles and makes coding accessible to young learners.
Tangible coding
Physical interaction in coding fosters a deeper connection. The Osmo Coding Starter Kit, through its innovative combination of tangible pieces and digital challenges, embodies this concept, offering an interactive pathway to mastery of fundamental coding skills. Engagement is heightened when children can move, adjust, and observe the results of their actions, reinforcing the connection between programming concepts and real-world applications.
Osmo Coding Starter Kit for Amazon Fire Tablet
The kit is also available for the Amazon Fire Tablet, ensuring that those with non-Apple devices experience the same hands-on coding opportunities. This cross-platform accessibility makes Osmo an excellent addition to any digital learning toolkit. By integrating technology with physical play, Osmo offers robust learning experiences that hone cognitive abilities and encourage creativity, perfect for tech-savvy young learners.
Tangible coding
Osmo’s approach exemplifies the immense potential of tangible coding. Combining real-world objects with software-based interactivity helps children visualize and internalize abstract concepts, forming a well-rounded learning experience. With proven effectiveness, Osmo sets the standard for aspiring young coders, making programming an exciting challenge rather than an intimidating skill to master.
Osmo Coding Awbie (iOS and Amazon)
Osmo Coding Awbie, geared for iOS and Amazon, offers an innovative learning environment. Children build sequences of commands while assisting Awbie’s adventures, making coding more engaging and concrete. By translating physical play into digital outcomes, Osmo Awbie successfully blurs the line between the tangible and virtual, offering a multi-sensory coding education that stimulates enthusiasm and encourages persistence.
Coding with character
Interactive characters add an emotional layer to coding tasks, making experiences memorable. Osmo Coding Awbie achieves this by integrating narratives, teaching kids to associate emotions with code-driven scenarios and building an enduring learning relationship with technology. By encouraging children to take ownership of their learning, Osmo fosters independence and confidence while laying a strong foundation in computer science fundamentals.
Our favorite science and exploration apps
Science-focused exploration apps can awaken a child’s curiosity about the world. By delving into science topics interactively, apps make learning exciting, transforming curious kids into young scientists eager to understand their environment.
An app to see what’s inside: The Human Body
The Human Body app takes children on a journey inside the human body, providing an in-depth view of anatomy and functions vital to life. This hand-held exploration introduces biology in an accessible, age-appropriate way. The app’s interactive design allows children to navigate through varying body systems, offering a visual and tactile learning experience that promotes early interest in science.
The Human Body (iOS and Android)
Available for both iOS and Android, The Human Body app offers a user-friendly platform where children can engage with detailed diagrams, animations, and interactive discoveries. With parent guides included, families can collaboratively explore the app’s content, ensuring that learning is comprehensive and that educational conversations extend beyond the digital sphere.
Seeing what’s inside
Seeing the world at a microscopic level encourages comprehension and fascinates young learners. Apps like The Human Body provide an informative and accessible means by which children can explore inner biological workings, igniting an interest in anatomy early on. Through digital dissections and real-time simulations, the app captivates children’s imaginations, fostering curiosity and an appreciation for biological sciences.
An app for discovering nature: Toca Boca Jr (Toca Nature)
Toca Nature lets children embark on a digital expedition into the natural world. They design landscapes, alter terrain, and cultivate ecosystems, all while observing how creatures respond and harmoniously coexist within their virtual surroundings. By simulating environmental settings, Toca Nature gives children insight into ecology, encouraging them to think sustainably and appreciate the delicate balance within natural environments.
Toca Boca Jr (iOS and Android)
Compatible with both iOS and Android, Toca Nature offers endless opportunities for environmental exploration. Its intuitive design caters to children of varying ages and abilities, ensuring that the experience remains engaging and rewarding. As children plant trees and re-sculpt virtual landscapes, they learn through the consequences of their actions, promoting ecological empathy and wonder.
Our favorite social and emotional learning apps
Social and emotional learning apps are instrumental in helping children navigate complex feelings and relationships. These games gently guide children’s emotional development, supporting them in gaining confidence, empathy, and self-awareness.
An app for self-expression: Me: A Kid’s Diary
Me: A Kid’s Diary is a digital platform where children can express their thoughts, dreams, and emotions creatively. It empowers kids to record memories, milestones, and reflections, fostering self-expression in an engaging and imaginative digital journal. By nurturing emotional literacy, the app invites children to reflect on their personal experiences, contributing to a better understanding of themselves and others.
Me: A Kid’s Diary (iOS)
Available on iOS, this app offers a secure space for expression. Its intuitive design encourages children to journal using various multimedia elements like text, images, and sound, catering to different modes of expression. By fostering autonomy over personal narratives, children gain confidence in articulating thoughts, paving the way for healthy emotional development and well-being.
A digital diary
Exploring inner worlds through apps like Me: A Kid’s Diary nurtures kids’ emotional growth, allowing them to communicate their feelings openly. This digital medium bridges the gap between parent and child by inviting discussions surrounding recorded ideas and reflections. The documented emotions create a tangible reference point, promoting emotional intelligence and self-assuredness while reinforcing interpersonal relationship skills.
An app for emotions: Daniel Tiger’s Grr-ific Feelings
Daniel Tiger’s Grr-ific Feelings assists children in understanding complex emotions in a friendly, relatable format. With the beloved Daniel Tiger, children learn to name, recognize, and manage feelings constructively. Through interactive songs, activities, and stories, this app offers valuable resources for children to build self-regulation and empathy skills—necessary tools for successful emotional development.
Daniel Tiger’s Grr-ific Feelings (iOS, Android, and Amazon)
This app is available on iOS, Android, and Amazon, ensuring access to a broad audience. Daniel Tiger’s inviting demeanor helps children resonate with the content, offering guidance for social interactions delivered in a welcoming format. Its music and hands-on activities make learning about emotions enjoyable, reinforcing positive ways to navigate daily challenges.
Exploring emotions
Delving into emotions with guidance from characters like Daniel Tiger empowers children to frame their feelings in healthy contexts. They learn critical life skills that support emotional well-being and encourage empathetic interactions. Through play and storytelling, emotions become more manageable, helping children navigate complex social environments with confidence and understanding.
Our favorite ebook app
Reading is foundational to a child’s education. Ebook apps revolutionize reading habits, offering expansive libraries that engage young learners and foster a lifelong love of literature.
An app for reading: Epic ebook subscription
The Epic ebook subscription service provides access to an extensive collection of children’s books. It indulges young readers with a vast range of genres and subjects, promoting diversified engagement with literature. This digital library encourages autonomous reading habits, propelling children into imaginative worlds where they can explore diverse characters, cultures, and ideas.
Epic Ebook Subscription
Epic is accessible on various devices, ensuring children can dive into books anywhere. Its user-friendly interface and tailored recommendations help enhance reading skills by aligning selections with a child’s interests and reading level. Adventures await young readers with every click, cementing literature as an irreplaceable part of growth and learning.
Endless ebooks
Through Epic’s expansive repository of ebooks, literature becomes boundless. Children begin a lifelong relationship with reading, delving into narratives that broaden vocabularies, stimulate imaginations, and enrich worldviews. The app cultivates autodidactic tendencies by nurturing a child’s natural curiosity, making reading both a fundamental educational pursuit and a beloved pastime.
How we picked and tested
Selecting the best educational games involves meticulous evaluation. Our methodology included assessing each app’s educational value, engagement level, accessibility, and alignment with developmental goals. Testing involved diverse children from varied backgrounds to ensure broad applicability. By balancing fun with educational merit and observing children’s genuine responses and adaptability, we’ve highlighted apps offering substantial learning experiences while keeping play intrinsic and fulfilling.
Sources
Our insights derive from discussions with educators, reviews from parents, and feedback from children who engaged with these apps. Peer-reviewed research on educational technology further enriched our understanding of their cognitive and emotional benefits. This collective knowledge forms the foundation of our recommendations, ensuring they meet contemporary educational criteria while remaining in sync with technological advances.
Meet your guide
Behind this exploration is Lucas Martin, a journalism and communications graduate passionate about blending learning with innovation. My dedication to understanding educational trends drives this comprehensive guide, aiming to equip parents with tools to enhance their children’s learning paths. My diverse interests in technology and education fuel my pursuit of promoting accessible, enjoyable learning experiences, championing each child’s potential to succeed through modern education.
Further reading
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| Category | Apps | Platforms |
|---|---|---|
| Math | Bedtime Math, DragonBox Numbers, DragonBox Big Numbers | iOS, Android, Amazon |
| Coding | Lightbot, Lightbot Jr, ScratchJr, Osmo Coding Awbie | iOS, Android, Amazon |
| Science & Exploration | The Human Body, Toca Boca Jr | iOS, Android |
| Social & Emotional Learning | Me: A Kid’s Diary, Daniel Tiger’s Grr-ific Feelings | iOS, Android, Amazon |
| Reading | Epic Ebook Subscription | Multiple Platforms |
These exceptional educational games open new doors for children, harmonizing education with engagement. Through thoughtful selection, parents and educators can cultivate enriching, adaptable environments that empower children throughout their learning journeys. With technological advancements influencing education, these tools illuminate pathways towards empowered learning, inspiring curiosity and growth among young learners worldwide.
