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5 Best Educational Apps for High-Schoolers

High school isn’t easy. Fortunately, these apps will help your student study for chemistry finals, figure out equations, and understand just what the heck their English teacher is talking about.  

Literary Analysis Guide

The app: Literary Analysis Guide.
Platforms: iOS & Android.
Cost: $3.99

This app contains all the terminology your student of literature needs to know. Information is arranged around four clickable interface wheels for poetry, prose, rhetoric, and figures of speech. Tapping any term will give you a definition, examples from literature, questions to ask a teacher, and example paragraphs from essays about each term.

Brian Cox’s Wonders of Life

The app: Brian Cox’s Wonders of Life.
Platforms: iOS & Android.
Cost: $1.39

Brian Cox is a presenter with the BBC. In fact, this app is a companion to his TV series of the same name. It offers a tour of some of the coolest environments out there, from the freshwater caves of the Yucatan peninsula to the deserts of Western Australia. Cox uses nature as a way to explain diverse science topics like thermodynamics, microbial life, and DNA. It comes with 2 hours of HD video, renderings of 30 3D creatures and habitats, and over a thousand high-res images with expert commentary. All in all, it’s pretty cool stuff.

Root Words

The app: Root Words.
Platform: Android.
Cost: Free.
Ages: 10+

One shortcut to learning words is to learn root words. By mastering roots like bio- and –ology, readers can figure out words like biology. The app works offline, offers multiple choice tests, and flash cards.

Wolfram Alpha

The app: Wolfram Alpha.
Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, Kindle.
Cost: $3.99

It’s hard to over-emphasize how important Wolfram Alpha has become to teaching math at the high school level and beyond. The app will help your student do literally any math problem that’s taught in high school. Not only that, but it will also give them a graphical representation of the problem, details of the formula used to solve the problem, and explain how it got the answer. Of course, this app is useful for more than pure math; it’s also good for life sciences, physics, statistics, computer science, and more.

High School Chemistry

The app: High School Chemistry.
Platforms: iOS & Android.
Cost: free.

Chemistry test coming up? Need to study how to balance reactions, addition, dissociation, double-replacement, oxidation-reduction reactions, or identifying reaction equilibrium? Well, here’s an app for you. This app will test you on foundational chemistry concepts. You can focus on one concept or take practice tests that will look a lot like chemistry final exams.

The Bottom Line

We understand that your high schooler’s phone is always going to be for texting friends first. And Snapchatting. And Instagramming. There’s a lot going on there. But that doesn’t mean a little education can’t sneak in too. Right?