Kids Academy

What is Kids Academy

Kids Academy is an innovative app that engages students through adaptive technology, artificial intelligence, and gamification. It’s a unique learn-through-play program that helps students advance in various subjects.

With Kids Academy, kids will learn and practice through the fun and engaging activities: educational games, interactive worksheets, quizzes, songs, books, videos and more. Kids Academy is one of those apps that feels well made from the moment you open it up. Little animations, well-chosen colour schemes and a wealth of options for different learning content are soon apparent to the user. Kids Academy s not just for those children who have been identified as being especially able, although it has content for those children too, its content is suitable to help all children develop their learning.

Kids Academy keeps track of a student’s progress to assist educators and parents in understanding areas of improvement.

Features

Children can use the learning path selector to spin a wheel and study a subject at random. Once you select an academic level that best matches your child's needs, your best bet is to start them on the Step-by-Step Learning Path, a series of lessons that gives your child a great overview of all the subjects on the platform.

From here, a video usually introduces the subject. These videos describe the learning in a clear and attractive visual format and are narrated by a friendly-sounding teacher. The instruction is excellent and explains the topic in a logical and useful way that will often echo how a child is taught by their own teacher.  

Kids Academy has variety of games for children to play as they reinforce their understanding. These are usually a variation of drag and drop or multiple choice questions and, while not being games in the truest sense, brighten up the player's learning.  

Another source of practice comes from the included worksheets. Many other apps eschew this classroom stalwart but this one embraces it.  Children can print out the worksheets to complete on paper or they can complete them on the device using their finger or an Apple Pencil, if they have one, on iOS devices. Quite unexpectedly, these worksheets are still self-marking and feedback the scores achieved.  

The videos, worksheets, and games being available for so many different topics do mean that the app will need to download them on an as-needed basis, so some form of data or wi-fi connection will be needed periodically for the app to be fully usable. This is an acceptable compromise, though, as, otherwise, the app would take up an impractical amount of your device's storage capacity.

Kids Academy can handle multiple player accounts, each administered through the parent's area, although it is most likely going to be teachers who need this functionality. A more fully-featured teachers' facility is currently close to release. Also within the parent's section is the reporting facilities of the app where the exercises that children have attempted, along with their scores, are shown.

The level of many of the activities in the traditional subjects would not in themselves be considered as specifically geared towards talented and gifted children as the app title would suggest - its appeal is broader than that. All children, after all, need to learn the maths, English, humanities and science that is related in the different learning paths.  

The superbly produced section on chess, however, allows the app to make a claim for its suitability for gifted and talented children.  Of course, all children can enjoy chess and should be encouraged in its pursuit if they enjoy it, but it is often those children who are most academically able who see the attraction of the game.  

Videos and worksheets introduce the history and rules of chess and over the course of more than 50 exercises build up a solid understanding of it. It would be particularly useful for children who like chess but whose parents have never developed the same interest and so are unable to help as much as they would like.

Overall Rating

Kids Academy is free to download so you can make an appraisal of how suitable it is at the full yearly price for your children over the seven days trial period that comes with it. Over the summer summer months, the subscription is heavily discounted so now would be an ideal time to check it out, especially as many parents are looking for ways to keep children's learning fresh over the long break from school.  There is a lot of breadth and depth to the content of this app so it is certainly worth your time to take a look.

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You can download Kids Academy on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the Kids Academy app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.