The best educational apps for kids
How to choose an app that will actually teach them something, using science
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Summary for busy sapiens
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Cara Goodwin, and she provided some incredibly useful tips for screen time with little kids. Today, we’re diving a little deeper into the question of choosing tablet or smartphone apps for young kids (7 and under, or so), and specifically, how to know if an app is “educational.”
The E-AIMS framework can be used to decide how well an app promotes learning in young kids. To be educational, apps should be:
Engaging: promote interaction that is fun, but not distracting, for kids
Actively Involved: require kids to actually use their brains
Meaningful: show content that kids can easily transfer to real life
Social: involve social interaction with people or characters
Here are some apps that researchers have rated highly using this framework: Zoombinis, LEGO DUPLO Town, Toca Boca apps, Noggin Preschool
9 min read
We hear the word “educational” thrown around a lot with young kids. It seems every toy is “Montessori-inspired,” and every game promotes “sensory development” or “early literacy skills.” I recently bought my child a play kitchen set, which claimed to benefit gross and fine motor skills, language and socialization, creative and imaginative play, and flexible problem-solving. My son likes to take the wooden corn cob and shove it as far into his mouth as possible.
When it comes to app for smartphones or tablets, the landscape is even more inscrutable. Search the App store for “educational apps” and you are greeted by a visual cacophony of brightly-colored icons—tens of thousands of mice and apples and zebras and letters and smiling bespectacled giraffes with giant heads and tiny bodies, all claiming to enhance your child’s brain development.
So, how can we know which apps are truly educational, and which are just non-edible corn cobs that our children will shove into their mouths?
The answer, techno sapiens, is science.
You, always with the science…
It turns out, we have a pretty good idea of what makes for a good educational app, and it comes down to the science of learning. A group of researchers have distilled this science into a framework of four “pillars,” which describe the four conditions under which children learn best. If these pillars are present in an app, the app is more likely to be educational.
So, what are these four pillars? The E-AIMS Model can help us remember them.
Apps are most educational when they are:
E - Engaging
AI - Actively Involved
M - Meaningful
S - Social
Other researchers have recently expanded on that framework to give us a better sense of what to look out for. And others—bless them—used the framework to systematically evaluate 124 children’s educational apps, including the most-downloaded in the Google and Apple app stores, so that we don’t have to do it ourselves.1 Angels do walk among us.2
So, today, I’m going to summarize what we’ve learned from these scientists to help us choose educational apps for our kids. We won’t be talking about other common iPad activities, namely, watching TV shows or YouTube (for research-based TV show recommendations, check out this post), but instead will focus on apps and games.
Many of the principles we’ll discuss apply to kids of all ages, but the specific app recommendations3 are geared toward kids ages 7 and under.
Disclaimers
But first! A few disclaimers.
Quick reminder that everything our children do does not need to be “educational.” It can be easy to forget this in our world of developmental-milestone-accelerating toy subscription boxes and baby foods claiming to enhance growth in the brain’s frontal lobe4. Learning is great! But kids also learn a lot from everyday activities like playing on a playground, chatting with a friend, picking at grass, and ripping a pancake into twelve tiny pieces. It’s okay to just let our kids be. It’s also okay to sometimes let them use screens in ways that aren’t “educational.”
The specific apps I’ll mention were evaluated in this study in 2019, according to the E-AIMS framework. New apps come out all the time, so there will be many apps missing from this list. Also, as always, this is just a single study—if other researchers were to apply the E-AIMS criteria to apps, perhaps they’d come up with a slightly different list. Hopefully, by learning about the framework ourselves, we can apply it to new apps on our own.
Just because an app is not mentioned on these lists, or was rated lower by the researchers, this does not mean it is bad, harmful, or that our children shouldn’t be using it.
Remember: our goal here is simply to think about how to sort through the myriad “educational” apps out there. That way, should you want to choose an app that will teach your child something while they use it, you will be equipped to do so.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s walk through what we’re looking for when choosing educational apps, using the E-AIMS model.
Educational apps should be…Engaging
Apps should have obvious learning goals (e.g., teaching letters of the alphabet, putting together puzzles) or clear storylines (e.g., characters go on a treasure hunt). They should be interactive, but avoid unnecessary bells and whistles. Sounds and visual effects should be used in service of the app’s learning goals, and should not be distracting. Same goes for feedback on performance (i.e., when your child gets something right or wrong).
Things to avoid:
Distracting advertising (e.g., embedded in the game, pops up mid-gameplay, a character in the game promotes in-app purchases)
Unnecessary, excessive, or irrelevant sounds or visuals that distract from learning (e.g., simple actions are followed by characters dancing, trumpets blaring, and sparkly rainbows filling the screen)
Things to look for:
No advertising, or if there is advertising, it should not be disruptive or distracting
Visual and sound effects that enhance learning and engagement in the game (e.g., child answers a question and gets specific feedback, like a character saying “Great job counting all the chickens!” or “Oops! That’s a banana, not an apple. Take another look around and see if you can find the apple.”)
Apps highly rated for Engagement:
Toca Boca apps (e.g., Toca Life: School, Toca Lab: Elements)
Kids should be…Actively Involved
To be educational, an app should promote active learning. This means it should require actual thinking and intellectual effort that’s appropriately suited to your child’s current abilities (sometimes called “minds-on” learning). Basically: does your child need to use their brain?
Things to avoid:
Activities that require little mental effort, involving only simple cause-and-effect (e.g., bubble popping games5)
Instructions that are way too simple for your child
Too many hints or prompts to give children the answers
Things to look for:
Activities that allow your child to generate responses (e.g., finding a shape to fit into a hole), rather than just reacting to things happening on the screen
Activities that involve solving problems (e.g., dragging letters to build a word, findings all the items of a particular color)
Apps that get incrementally more challenging as your child masters different activities
Child has to follow several steps to complete a task, and hints are appropriately subtle for their age
Apps highly rated for Active Learning:
Toca Boca apps (e.g., Tocal Life: World, Toca Life: Neighborhood)
Learning should be…Meaningful
Young kids will learn more from an app when they can relate to the content. This could mean that the app involves settings they’re familiar with (e.g., school, home, neighborhood) or information they recognize from their real life (e.g., animals, foods). Learning is more meaningful when it’s presented in contexts children recognize—for example, presenting animals in a story about barnyard dancing is more meaningful than presenting animals on flash cards (i.e., rote memorization). Repetition also helps kids make meaning out of what they’re seeing and doing.
Things to avoid:
Activities that involve rote learning or memorization only, with no connection to why the information might be important or meaningful (e.g., simply showing the letter A repeatedly)
Activities that have no relevance to child’s life outside the app
Things to look for:
Content that would be easy to transfer to real life (e.g., involving familiar characters, locations, or facts kids are already learning)
Use of multiple examples and contexts to teach concepts (e.g., showing the letter A, repeating the sound, tracing the A, showing pictures/spellings of alligators, apples, and airplanes, and telling a story about an alligator)
Apps highly rated for Meaningful Learning:
Educational apps should be…Social
Children learn best when the learning is social (i.e., involves other people). Some apps are designed to promote kids’ engagement with parents, also called “Joint Media Engagement” (JME). This is ideal for learning, but, of course, many of us are not necessarily looking to sit down together with our child every time they tune into the iPad. Thus, although not as beneficial as real-life interaction, apps can also be considered “social” if they mimic real-world interaction, such as by engaging with characters in the game.
Things to avoid:
No opportunities to interact with characters on the screen
Things to look for:
Opportunities for high-quality interactions with the characters in the app (e.g., character responds to your child’s actions in a way that indicates it understands the child, like looking at them and asking questions)
Opportunities for “face-to-face interactions around the screen” (e.g., you or a sibling play together with your child)
App gives children ideas for how to transfer knowledge into the real world with a parent or sibling
Apps highly rated for Social Interaction:
Summing up
Here are a few of the apps that scored highest across all categories in the study:
Toca Boca apps (Toca Life: Neighborhood, Toca Life: World)
And here are a few other promising apps:
One of the most popular (free!) educational apps right now is Khan Academy Kids. I tested this (in the name of science, of course), and it seems to check the E-AIMS boxes. No distracting ads or pop-ups, social interaction with cute animal characters, lots of repetition of skills across different contexts. Note that it might require a bit of trial and error to find the games that are appropriately challenging for your child.
PBS Kids Games scored a bit lower in the study. However, many PBS shows and apps (e.g., PBS Kids Play & Learn Science) have some research to support their efficacy for learning and development. Also, if kids are already watching PBS shows and familiar with the characters, I see some benefit to these apps in terms of meaningful transfer of knowledge.
Research has also supported HOMER Learn and Grow, developed with the evidence-based HOMER method, in teaching early literacy skills.
Do you have recommendations for educational apps your kids love? Let us know in the comments!
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I downloaded a few of these apps to test for this post. On the one hand, there’s something uniquely degrading about sitting in your office, alone, staring at your phone while a pink elephant sings a song about grapes to you. On the other hand, when testing the second-grade version of Khan Academy Kids, I learned—for the first time—the definition of a “collective noun.” Apparently, it is the word for a group of things, like “team” or “bunch.” Did other people know this?
Seriously, though, I cannot believe the amount of time and effort that must have gone into evaluating 124 of these apps. This process, of painstakingly coding existing text, pictures, videos, or in this case, apps, is sometimes called “content analysis.” I have nightmares about a content analysis of social media posts I attempted during grad school. It sounds fun, I know. Let me assure you: it is not fun.
It probably goes without saying that these app recommendations are not sponsored. I’m not nearly important enough for that.
Here is an actual description of a spinach, apple, and sweet potato baby food puree I came across online: “…high in Iron, Folate, Vitamin E, Selenium, and DHA, as well as 12 other key nutrients to support your baby's developing brain. This rich nutrient combo supports the growth of the brain’s Broca’s area, responsible for baby’s epic language skills, as well as the frontal lobe, which controls cognitive abilities like emotional expression, problem solving, and memory.” I’m sorry. Maybe spinach, apple, and sweet potato do, in fact, do all these things, but c’mon. Oh, also, want to know how they describe their “pea basil” puree? “This powerful nutrient blend helps support your baby's ability to interpret simple signals like touch, pressure, and pain, while also supporting the brain region responsible for your little one’s object and facial recognition.” Peas! They’re peas!
Ah, good, old bubble popping games. The app store is filled with claims about these games: that they help promote visual scanning, attention, memory, finger isolation (?), stress relief, hand-eye coordination, etc. If you and your children enjoy bubble popping games, please! Continue playing them! But also, it’s worth recognizing that they are probably not as educational as the app developers would like us to believe.
Further reading and resources
Zero to Three: Choosing Media Content for Young Children Using the E-AIMS Model
Common Sense Media: Reviews of hundreds of apps for kids of all ages
Meyer et al., 2021. How educational are “educational” apps for young children? App store content analysis using the Four Pillars of Learning framework. Journal of Children and Media.
All of the DragonBox math apps are fantastic. For this age group, Numbers is amazing. The higher math skills games aren't quite as good, but still worth the money.
This thread was surprising because it didn't compare the evaluative research on HOMER versus Spalding (phonograms-based -- www.spalding.org) reading and writing programs. Would it be possible to get such a comparison in a follow-up post, perhaps?
Here is the news segment that initially prompted this inquiry:
https://youtu.be/xtmhNmGTIw4