5 educational iPhone games for High School students
By Phil Hornshaw
Listening to lectures, taking notes, reading textbooks — for some students, the traditional school approach just doesn’t make learning very easy. There are alternative methods for learning, however, and the rise of the smartphone has led to a whole lot of mobile games that double as teaching tools.
While there are lots of educational games for younger kids, though, the pickings are much, much slimmer for high school students. Finding games that can teach older students something useful can be tough, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We’ve run down a few useful (and fun) educational games for high school students that iPhone owners should definitely check out.
You can download these apps through Apple’s iTunes App Store, where you can get 1 percent Cash Back and $50 or $100 gift cards for apps with other qualifying purchases (when you buy a Mac for College or a standard iPad purchase).
Challenging yourself and having fun doing it
Turns out, there aren’t many games that are designed to be educational to high-schoolers, but there are a number of great games that are both fun, and might end up teaching them a thing or two. Brain Challenge ($4.99) is just such an app — it’s packed with 43 different mini-games and is meant to, you know, challenge your brain. Playing through its games will help you see how much you know and can also help identify areas that need work.
Lumosity Mobile (Free) is another app built on small, everyday challenges to help you learn or increase your aptitude in skills like memory and attention, which are key to learning. Its developers claim Lumosity’s approach is based more in science, and it’s actually designed to help users reach their knowledge goals, instead of just be entertaining. In fact, the challenges in the app are a lot like games is almost coincidental.
Probably the most fun approach to trivia ever devised is You Don’t Know Jack (Free). It’s puts players into what feels like a hilarious, zany game show, allowing them to compete against one another to answer questions and win money. Despite its outwardly goofball presentation, You Don’t Know Jack is surprisingly knowledgeable about all things. You might inadvertently internalize some of that info as you’re laughing at the show’s corporate sponsors, like Allergy Clusters cereal.
The New York Times’ daily crossword puzzles are known to challenge even the smartest readers, and you can get all that crossword toughness on your iPhone with NYTimes Crossword (Free). The app is simple enough, packing crossword puzzles from the newspaper (note that you’ll need to purchase an in-app subscription to play a lot of them, starting at around $2.99 for a month of puzzles) that are updated daily. There are also 6,000 classic puzzles included as well.
Our final pick for this list isn’t really a game, although it has game-like elements, and it’s too cool to ignore. It’s Project Noah (Free), an app whose goal is to document the world’s wildlife. It packs lots of information about all kinds of animals, insects, birds and more, and users can participate by uploading images of creatures they’ve spotted in the wild. When you upload a photo, the app sends it off to scientists who can help you identify it, with a response usually coming by the next day. The game part, however, is Project Noah’s “Field Missions” feature, which provide users with assignments to find certain wildlife in their areas to help actual scientists working on research projects.
