It would be a shame to waste the potential of your smart gizmo on the likes of PUBG or Fortnite only. But you can also use the phone for stuffing your brains with precious knowledge and skills that can be applied both in the classroom and real life.
There’s nothing wrong about giving yourself a little loosening every now and then – in fact, it’s vital for sustaining your cognitive abilities and memory. And our Top 10 Android apps for education will surely do the trick.
Enjoy!
EdX – The pocket lecture room
EdX isn’t just an app, it’s a MOOC service. In which MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses. The thing is, EdX contains almost an infinite number of lectures on all the university subjects you can imagine:
- Biochemistry
- History
- Data Science
- Public Health
- Business & Management
- Food & Nutrition
- Law
And many others – 650 courses in total.
What makes EdX stand out is that all the classes, handouts, lectures, etc. are authored by the real college mentors and are being taught in the real University classrooms. As for now, about 90 higher education institutions collaborate with EdX, and among them you can find such big names as MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Boston University, and so on.
There are five types of courses available:
- EdX Verified Courses – they are handy if you urgently need a certificate for a job/school, etc.
- XSeries Programs.
- High School Courses – get prepared and test yourself before college.
- Credit Eligible Courses.
- Professional Education Courses – upgrade your resume.
To become a part of EdX, you need to:
- Download the app.
- Search for a course you want.
- Read about the conditions of the course.
- Tap on “Register Now”.
- The course you picked will appear on the dashboard, which means you can begin studying.
What’s especially alluring – courses featured in EdX are totally free, with the exception of the Verified Courses – $50 starting price. There’s a 2-weeks refund and also the financial assistance policy, in case you’re on a very tight budget.
Google Play Books – Authoritarian library
Google Play Books allows you to enjoy the finest works of literature or plug away at textbooks, encyclopedias, guides, dictionaries, and so on. Though there is a little exasperating nuance: you are allowed to display only the books purchased in Google Play.
So if you have an impressive stash of tomes, you intended to feed to your brains one by one, and they were downloaded from somewhere else – Google Play Books isn’t your app of choice.
As for the rest, it has a standard functionality of a book app:
- Day/night regimes
- Highlighter
- Bookmarks
- Adjustable font size, etc.
A couple of unique features has also made it to the party: Google Translate, Wikipedia, location map, and dictionary are supported in the app.
Khan Academy – Kneel before Khan
For free. For everyone. Forever. This is how the motto of the educational platform Khan Academy goes. The project intends to offer high-quality education free of charge to all the people interested, around the world.
The platform can proudly offer:
- Micro-lectures in the form of YouTube videos.
- Study materials of ranging difficulty levels: from kindergarten to university.
- A vast number of courses: computer science, art history, macroeconomics, etc.
- Test Prep including SAT.
- Tests & grades powered by the AI.
Besides Khan Academy can boast of exclusive educational content provided by NASA, Museum of Modern Arts, etc.
You can get registered as a student, teacher or parent – the latter account allows you to track the progress of your kid. But if you want to skip the sign-up part, just do it – Khan Academy won’t block you from accessing the materials.
The app’s functionality is reduced to watching/downloading videos, but all of the Academy’s content is absolutely free.
Quizlet – Royal flash
Quizlet is a flashcard app based upon the rote learning principles. It will always help you be prepared for a quiz, especially if you study foreign languages.
In Quizlet, you can either create flashcards, diagrams, etc. yourself or use the educational content forged by the community. And apart from languages, you can use any topic you need to study:
- Chemistry
- Geography
- History of the USA
- Capital states, etc.
But apart from school/college subjects, Quizlet can be applied for training the employees, for example. A bunch of American companies, such as Whole Foods, train their staff with the help of those neat little flashcards.
All in all, Quizlet has six modes to try your knowledge with:
- Speller – you must impeccably type in some term/word voiced by the app.
- Gravity – definition of a word noses down towards the bottom of the screen. Type its name, until it “crash-lands”.
- Flashcards.
- Learn – give the term/definition to what is shown on a picture.
- Match.
- Live – a little competition among the class teams on defining/giving terms.
Furthermore, Quizlet supports text-to-speech, voice recordings and adding pictures as the illustration to the flashcards. With the Pro version of the app – $19.99 annually – you can add your own pics as well as create extensive diagrams and get rid of the ads.
Beware: occasional spelling mistakes lurk around Quizlet.
Socratic – Homework helper for the lazy
The Greek philosopher Socrates used to question answers. The mobile app Socratic does quite the opposite: it answers questions. And how marvelously!
You can definitely tell that the future has already come by seeing the way Socratic does its job. After you have installed it on your phone, simply snap a picture of a task. Let’s say a math equation and wait a little bit.
Using the machine learning algorithms and an extensive database of questions, problems, and solutions, Socratic will come up with an answer momentarily. What’s even more attractive, the app doesn’t simply solve a math problem but also breaks the solving process down explaining it to you step by step.
It requires very little time to accomplish the task and apart for mathematics Socratic knows a lot fairly about:
- Science
- Biology
- History
- Chemistry
- Grammar
- Humanities, etc.
All in all, there are 23 subjects available.
Besides, Socratic complements the answers with helpful graphs and tutorials from such platforms as Khan Academy and others.
SoloLearn – Hello world of programming
Do you have an ambition of becoming an ace at computer programming but don’t know where to begin? Don’t panic, because SoloLearn is exactly what you need.
SoloLearn isn’t a single app – it consists of a broad assortment of apps, with every single one specializing in a specific language. It’s like a TV-series consisting of many chapters:
- PHP
- Python
- C++
- Java
- JavaScript
- JQuery
- HTML, etc.
This teach-yourself app introduces you to the theory and basics of a programming language in a pretty dynamic way.
Users can leave commentaries, explaining a particularly difficult part of the language. Furthermore, they can even compete with each other by gaining XP points, winning trophies and higher positions in the leaderboards.
SoloLearn is free of charge and ads so you won’t be distracted while studying.
Udacity – App for audacious coders
Udacity is another online platform for learning computer programming and engineering. Unlike EdX, Coursera or Khan Academy, Udacity has a pretty austere catalog of courses that are divided into self-paced/ time-limited courses.
The courses are mostly authored by project’s partners that include:
- Nvidia
- AT&T
- San Jose State University, etc.
Free courses mostly allow you to watch mini-lectures. But subscribing to a course or Nanodegree for $200 monthly unlocks additional features, such as communicating with other students, getting feedback, and receiving special certificates which (as Udacity claims) look very attractive to the prominent employers.
Udemy – MOOC pioneer
Udemy was one of the pioneering educational apps a while ago, and today it has a gargantuan catalog of almost 33,000 courses and classes.
The subjects include:
- Computer science
- Marketing & PR
- Culinary
- Foreign Languages
- Web Development, etc.
However, users report that most of the courses, although at a lower price than those offered by rivals, are useless. With the exception of 5-8% at best. Moreover, Udemy has been known for occasional instability when already paid-for courses were wiped out of the user’s dashboard due to technical issues.
On the positive side, the mobile app is as user-friendly as the desktop version of Udemy and the prices are mostly low, starting at 10$ per course.
Wolfram Alpha – Smarter than Google
Wolfram Alpha claims to be as omniscient as the Star Trek’s all-knowing computer.
It’s an intelligent and laconic search engine available in free and pro versions that specializes in finding the answers from its own “smart” database. In other words, the search results will be purely related to the same scientific field that your initial inquiry was. That’s what you especially need when working with numbers and figures.
Wolfram Alpha has a special keyboard that features math symbols and even the Greek alphabet, which means you can use it to solve equations, etc.
It has Examples, History,and favorite tabs to make the searching easier and faster.
YouTube – Needs no introduction
The name speaks for itself. Being the biggest video-service in the world, it has the biggest chunk of educational videos as well.
Guitar lessons and cooking tutorials, DIY videos, documentaries on syphilis in the medieval era, and flashy videos about quantum physics – odds are you’ll find anything here. But in case the abundance confuses you, and you have no idea where to begin, try some of those channels:
- TED
- National Geographic
- Khan Academy
- VSauce
- Vox
- Computerphile
- Programming Knowledge
- Treehouse.
Video recommendations will help you discover more.
FAQs for education apps for Android:
Education apps for Android are mobile applications designed to help students and learners of all ages with their educational needs. These apps can provide learning materials, interactive lessons, practice exercises, and other tools to help users improve their knowledge and skills.
Education apps for Android cover a wide range of subjects, from basic literacy and numeracy to advanced topics in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Some apps may focus on specific subjects, such as language learning, coding, or test preparation.
There are many education apps for Android that are free to download and use, although some may offer additional features or content through in-app purchases or subscription models. It is important to research an app’s pricing model before downloading it to avoid any unexpected charges.
While education apps for Android can be a useful supplement to classroom learning, they are not intended to replace it entirely. In-person instruction and social interaction with peers and teachers are important components of the learning experience, and education apps should be used in conjunction with traditional learning methods.
Education apps for Android are designed for learners of all ages, from preschoolers to adults. Some apps may be tailored to specific age groups or grade levels, while others may be more general in their approach. It is important to choose an app that is appropriate for your age, skill level, and educational needs.