4 tips to seeing if an educational app will actually help your child learn

Imagine someone telling you that a new technology would be available in five years that has the potential to revolutionize childhood and early education. But the downside is that you will have to choose from among 80,000 possible options. This is the problem currently facing many parents. Following the invention of the iPad in 2010, by January 2015 there were 80,000 apps marketed as "educational" in the Apple App Store alone.

We recently published a large-scale review of more than 200 articles on the question of how we can put the education back in educational apps. We used several well-worn principles that parents, educators and app developers can use to determine what is truly educational and what is simply masquerading as such. Here is what we found. Read more...