15 iPhone Apps Every Tween Needs

Khan Academy’s ambitious goal is to provide a “free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” This app offers courses in everything your child will study in school, from learning shapes in kindergarten to AP Calculus for high school seniors, and it doesn’t cost anything. It’s the MVA (most valuable app) when it comes to homework help, too. If you’re only going to download one app for your child, make it Khan Academy.

I’m generally against games that try to be educational—it’s a trick that rarely works, and I’d hate it if someone tried to make me learn something from a video game—but Box Island is an exception. This story-based adventure/puzzle game teaches the basics of computer programming through puzzle solving on a cartoonish tropical island. And it’s actually fun—not “learning-fun,” but fun-fun.

Universe in a Nutshell gives children a way of reckoning with the scale of Universe by presenting a way to compare different sized objects. You can go from a minuscule quark to an entire galaxy in seconds of scrolling, and clicking on any of the many, many objects in-between gives you interesting and often hilarious descriptions of what you’re looking at.

I can’t make a list of “good software for kids” without including Minecraft. The surviving, crafting, and building game fosters creativity, cooperation, and critical thinking, plus tons of skeletons to kill. The mobile version is missing some features of PC and console Minecraft, but it’s still a one-of-kind experience that belongs on every child’s iPhone or iPad.

There are note-taking and organizing apps designed specifically for kids and tweens, but most kids want to be more grown-up, and Evernote is so easy to use and packed with tutorials, they can skip the baby versions. Your 12-year-old probably won’t need the more advance features like scanning business cards or organizing airplane tickets, but an app that does the basics—organizing your appointments and notes—is useful at any age.

Players absolutely love High School Story. This interactive fiction game tasks you with building your own high school, recruiting students, and solving the problems that come from mixing jocks, nerds, and other stereotypes. It confronts some of the anxieties that tweens often have about entering high school—bullying, dating, fitting in—without being heavy-handed or preachy.

Every kid should learn to play guitar, or at least give it an honest shot. Fender Play offers a comprehensive, video-based guitar course that starts at “I’ve never picked up a guitar” and goes up to “I can jam out with my friends.” It’s way cheaper than in-person lessons, and kids will like the friendly, patient instructors and the clear-progress indicators.

 The Oregon Trail is an American institution. The iOS version of the classic video game about traveling across the plains to the Pacific Northwest has been updated and modernized, but the core gameplay (shepherding a frontier wagon through a hostile wilderness) remains. Kids will learn a little about American history, a little about resource management and organization, and have a ton of fun—if they don’t die of dysentery along the way.

Garageband is really good. Apple’s music-creation software is simple enough that any tween will be able to pick it up immediately, and deep enough that it can be used for near radio-ready production. It lets you combine pre-made loops and drum tracks to to create beats and songs, even if you don’t how to play an instrument. If you get more advanced, you can plug in your guitar or keyboard and rock out and even lay down vocals.

Sporty kids need apps too. The Bleacher Report is a comprehensive sports news app offering all the athletic news you could ever want, the moment you want it. You can set alerts for your favorite team, share items instantly on social media, and more. This app is not designed for kids, but if you have a sports-obsessed 11 year-old in your house, only the real thing is going to be good enough.

While iOS offers basic video editing with its camera app, Magisto takes it way further by letting you edit videos and slideshows nearly instantly. It’s packed with templates, fonts, and more, and it will even cut your video for you with its artificial intelligence-driven smart editor. Just what your tween needs to create (and hopefully monetize!) their videos.

If you have a tween who wants to play god, give ‘em Toka Nature. This nature simulator lets you create your ideal world by terraforming mountains, rivers, and more at the touch of a button. Once you place some animals, you can watch them live their lives in the environment you’ve created. You could view this as a lesson in the interconnectedness and fragility of the natural world if you wanted to get serious about it, but you don’t have to.

There are a lot of apps about meditation, but Headspace stands out. These guided meditations are mostly for adults, but they’ve recently added meditations for kids and families designed to help children focus better and be more aware of how they’re learning and thinking. If you have a tween who needs to chill out and learn a little mindfulness, Headspace might be just what the guru ordered.

Kids are fascinated with their dreams, particularly as they get closer to adulthood, and Capture: Your Dream Journal gives them an easy, fun way to record and categorize their nighttime visions. I don’t put a ton of stock in dream interpretation and analysis, but it would be simply amazing if I had a searchable journal of what I dreamed about when I was 12.

I love Little Alchemy 2. It’s just a pure idea realized perfectly. In this sandbox game, you are given a few simple elements—earth, air, water, fire, etc.—and you combine them to create something new. Then you combine the combinations to make a more complicated creation, and so on, until you create many more advanced things like machines, Godzilla, or a human, as you can see in the video above.