Top 7 Educational App Ideas to Broaden your Horizons
Education is an evergreen trend you can benefit from: applications in anatomy, physics, chemistry, astronomy and art occupy the first lines in the App Store, win awards for the best designs and interfaces and are purchased by hundreds of thousands of people. We’ve chosen the most mind-blowing examples to bring you some inspiration for your own app.
1. MentalCase
A beautiful application that delicately outdoes the classics of the mnemotechnical genre. It will be useful when learning a language or preparing for your driving exams. You can create flash card collections using your own text, photos and audio recordings. If you have no special requirements for the collections, you can use the existing ones – collected in the largest repository on the Internet. After creating the card catalogue, the application will automatically compose lessons for you, during which the cards will be shown in the manner most effective in helping you memorise the sequence.
2. QuickReader
This is an app that teaches the speed-reading technique. The essence of the method is to teach the brain to fix, while reading aloud, not just individual sounds and letters – which are then assembled into words from the vocabulary – but whole phrases. The app offers one of thousands of free books, highlighting the words with colour almost like a karaoke machine – so there’s no need to scroll or flip the text. Everything else comes with the ability to customise the interface. The developers have promised to add other languages, but for now you can practice your skills in Spanish, French or English languages.
3. Periodic Table of Videos
A series of crazy and funny videos on the 118 elements of the periodic table, prepared by scientists at the University of Nottingham. The protagonist of the story is Martin Polyakoff, an eminent professor who is known for his research in the field of green chemistry, supercritical fluids and infrared spectroscopy.
All this does not prevent him from talking about chemistry easily and simply, illustrating his words with classic geek experiments: for example, dropping a cheeseburger into hydrochloric acid.
4. Sixty Symbols
A science app that contains another collection of videos – this time devoted to physics and astronomy. The developers collected 60 characters used to refer to different concepts and explained what each of them means from a scientific point of view. These videos do not resemble theoretical lectures, but rather intimate conversations about the most beloved and the details and subtleties that you begin to notice when you work with one subject for a long time.
For example, you can find out how the Feigenbaum constant helps our understanding of chaos, what strange properties electromagnetic waves have, and what sort of character Isaac Newton had.
There are also more practical topics, such as why the trajectory of a rugby ball is constantly changing, how Nobel laureates in physics are chosen and how we’re affected by Brazil nuts. Scientists spell everything out, taking as examples Coca-Cola cans and chocolate cakes, and clearly want to be understood. This application perfectly satisfies a special kind of sadness: the feeling that there is something very important in the world that you cannot understand.
5. Khan Academy App
This application consists of detailed 10-minute lectures intended to structure knowledge in the fields of mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry, economics and finance. In fact, the entire academy consists of one person, Salman Khan, the living embodiment of the American dream. The story is classical: a talented young man from an immigrant family who graduated from MIT and Harvard found out that his little cousin, who lived in another city, had problems with maths at school. He decided to help her by posting video lesson materials on YouTube and instantly became famous, first among grateful schoolchildren and parents and then among investors. Now Bill Gates calls him the favourite teacher of his children, and Google and the Gates Foundation have declared that they will invest in the further development of the online university. Some believe that this base of educational videos is the first step towards an education revolution where apps replace classrooms.
6. The Moma App
This is almost the entire collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art in one app. You can pre-select exhibits that you don’t want to miss, create a route to visit numerous halls and compose a soundtrack for the visit from specially selected music, as well as learn more about the history of creating paintings and the lives of the artists as you stand right in front of their masterpieces. There is also a sub-application – MoMa Books – a navigator for the extensive museum library, which has collected more than 300,000 publications on art.
7. TED App
A collection of more than 700 videos of TED lecturers: educational revolutionaries, technical geniuses, independent scientists, innovators, inventors and other geeks. The program allows you to watch videos offline (for example, on a plane) and adjust the image quality depending on the connection speed. There are also nice bonuses like the Inspire me function, which forms a playlist that takes into account the tastes and free-time level of the user. You can choose the mood of the video (funny, inspiring), theme (future, thinking outside the box) and more specific tags (robots, happiness).
How to Make the Best App with Educational Content
If you think you can help people learn something new with an app, you need a detailed plan for future development:
- Polish the general idea of your educational tool and define your target audience.
- Search for the analogues available on the market and compare their advantages and weaknesses.
- Create your own business strategy and marketing plan.
- Address professional app developers to discuss your project and build an MVP.
- Test your product on real people and collect feedback.
- Make adjustments and updates to meet the needs of your users.
If you’re still in doubt as to whether you’re ready to build your own app or an educational game, complete our quiz and find out just how ready you are.
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