What Makes a Good App

What Makes a Good App

1. The activity must require active mental engagement. Aside from what the child's hands are doing, gears in the child's brain should be turning so that they are mentally interacting with the media: thinking, predicting, questioning, drawing connections, reflecting, etc.

2. They must be able to focus on the learning experience without distractions in the app or in their learning environment. "In terms of bells and whistles, use them strategically," Kirkorian said. "You don't want to have a lot of distracting things that pull away from the key lesson. But if there are interactive features that help move the story forward, that can be helpful."

3. The children should be able to bridge the new knowledge they're gaining to their existing knowledge and the wider world. If they can't apply their new learning to the real world, it's meaningless.

4. The learning activity should involve social interaction, such as teacher feedback, class discussions or interactions among classmates. This element is most crucial for younger children and declines (but doesn't necessarily disappear) in importance as children grow older.

5. The activity should have clearly defined learning objectives that can be tracked and assessed by students or teachers and that expand on past goals to build on previous learning. This concept is called scaffolding. "The really useful tech in the classroom scaffolds to the child's skills, adjusting to the child's skills and letting teachers see children's progress and where students are struggling," Piotrowski said.

6. Another thing to think of is how many rating are on it and what does it come with. Most educational apps are free they have there limits inside them but they try to make it available to as many student and their families as possible.