At the end of month, we review some of our favorite educational apps that have been released or updated over the last thirty days. (Read our previous months' reviews.) Below you’ll find a mixture of iOS, Android, and Web-based apps.
- NASA VISUALIZATION EXPLORER
NASA's latest iPad app, the NASA Visualization Explorer (iTunes, free) brings some of NASA's research to the tablet. Developed in conjunction with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the app includes visuals straight from NASA's satellites. The app includes high-resolution movies and still, as well as short stories and interviews helping to explain the material and the steps NASA takes in its research. NASA says it plans to update the app with two new science features per week.
- WRECK THIS APP
Wreck This App (iTunes, $4.99) takes Keri Smith's bestselling Wreck This Journal and turns it into an iPad app. For those unfamiliar with the title, Wreck This Journal encourages creativity through destruction, if you will, by encouraging people to paint, tear, poke holes, and scribble, challenging what it means to be creative within the pages of a journal. Wreck This App takes this concept and digitizes it, so users can doodle, scribble and deface the app.
Of course, you're not really wrecking the app the same way you wreck a printed journal, as you can erase your digital marks and tears and then wreck the app again and again.
- KONA'S CRATE
Kona's Crate (iTunes and Android Market, $.99) is an incredibly fun puzzle game available for iOS and Android devices. The game requires you maneuver a jetpack in order to deliver crates to Chief Kona.