Common Core App Roundup

As more states continue to adopt the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), developers are seizing on the opportunity to produce educational apps aligned to these standards. Following our previous collections of CCSS-aligned apps, EducationWorld offers this new list of apps to help teachers adapt to the Common Core. All apps are for iOS devices and can be purchased in The App Store.

Core (free)

Teachers can view all of the CCSS in one convenient app, and it’s completely free. This great reference helps students, parents and teachers easily read and understand the standards. Users can quickly find standards by a variety of filters including subject and grade. This app includes both math and language arts standards for K-12. The math standards include both traditional and integrated pathways (as outlined in Appendix A of the Common Core) and synthesizes Language Arts standards with the Corresponding College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRs).

Grammar Dragon (99 cents)

The grammar dragon has captured all of your friends from the castle, and you must rescue a different person on each level by correctly identifying various parts of speech. Grammar Dragon is a learning game that encourages the player to use parts of speech to develop cognitive reading and verbal skills. The touch mechanic of the game engages students in a hands-on learning process, implementing kinesthetic learning. The game also incorporates words and sentence structure to the particular grade level, based on excerpts from grade-appropriate reading materials.

MiniMod Reading for Inferences Lite ($3.99)

Minimod Reading for Inferences helps students master the essential reading comprehension skill of inferential thinking. The game mode is very much like BINGO—students read a passage about the fascinating cultures of the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs, then answer a question about the passage that requires inferential thinking, in order to win a letter. Each program offers three levels of reading difficulty, and students can play in either practice mode or game mode.

Literary Analysis Guide ($3.99)

This app is an essential tool for anyone studying literature or rhetoric in high school. By arranging the elements of literature graphically around three wheels (poetry, prose and rhetoric), teachers and students are better able to visualize how the elements of literature develop style and meaning. Click on any of the literary terms listed around the wheels, and a screen appears with a detailed definition of the term, several examples from literature, and questions to test understanding. Click on “Figures of Speech” from any of the three wheels and the “Figures of Speech Wheel” appears, which functions in the same way as the three others.

Algebra Touch ($3.99)

This app will refine students’ algebra skills using touch-based techniques on any iOS device.



Students will enjoy the wonderful conceptual leaps of algebra, without getting bogged down by the tedium of traditional methods. Users can drag to rearrange, tap to simplify, and draw lines to eliminate identical terms. They can also easily switch between lessons and randomly generated practice problems. Teachers will like that they can create their own sets of problems to work through in the equation editor, and have them appear on all of students’ devices via iCloud.

The current material covers simplification, like terms, commutativity, order of operations, factorization, prime numbers, elimination, isolation, variables, basic equations, distribution, factoring out and substitution.



KosmicMath 3rd Grade ($2.99)

KosmicMath is a space exploration game that uses NASA imagery, themed animations and sound effects to create an immersive educational experience. Two modes of play, Mission and Drill, encourage students to master their math tables and chart their progress.

In Mission mode, players are urged to demonstrate mastery over basic mathematical operations as they travel through the solar system collecting alien trophies and visiting NASA web sites. In Drill mode, players are given a pop quiz which is individually scored, emailed and archived along with the problem set, player answers and statistics about the player’s responses. The KosmicMath problem generation engine automatically adjusts the player’s difficulty and settings as they progress through 25 increasing levels of challenge.

Article by Jason Tomaszewski, EducationWorld Associate Editor
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