Studystorm

The Studystorm app contains a wealth of educational videos across a range of core academic subjects - maths, science, English and additional learning skills. It is aimed at the American market, with spellings, spoken accents and curriculum content reflecting this fact throughout.

The app itself is small and quick to load, but requires a constant internet connection due to the fact that each video is streamed as required. The videos themselves are accurate in the educational content they cover, with a lecture type approach to presenting the material - with spoken commentary from the teacher and notes written on a whiteboard or similar as necessary throughout the video. Although the content is comprehensive, it will not necessarily capture the interest or motivate students who are not keen to learn anyway.

This app is completely free, including the full set of videos included. It is possible to buy an ad-free version, but the free version being reviewed had adverts throughout - including on menu screens, shown before videos played and on banners around the screen. This provides a very distracting feature within the app, although this is not a problem in the paid version. It is understandable given that the content is being provided for free, but may well put students off continued use over time.

To look into the content in a little more depth - the topics covered align mostly with the upper end of secondary school curriculum requirements. The maths covered includes topics such as pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. Science includes physics, chemistry and biology. English covers literature, writing and grammar. There are also several sections involving preparation for specific American exams, and more generally skills for getting into college and making the most of high school in America. Although this is clearly rich with different topics and subjects, it is worth bearing in mind that this would not cover all the topics for a foreign curriculum. Taking the specifics of the English maths curriculum, there are many topics not included, such as anything on statistics or probability. That said, a good teacher or organised student could pick and choose the videos that would benefit them alongside other approaches to learning and revision.

Overall, this is clearly a useful app and well suited to revising topics for American exams. That said, the adverts really do provide quite a distraction from the content, as well as causing a delay in using the videos. In terms of its use for other curricula, if videos are chosen carefully to supplement the topics being learnt, then they can certainly help with introducing and revising core material, but the app could not be relied on to deliver the majority of the curriculum in this way. Given the nature of the videos, it is also possible that the style could become rather samey long before the thousands of videos have been viewed.

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