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The best (and mostly free) apps to help you keep up in class
By design, school is supposed to challenge you -- to push at the boundaries of your understanding of the world and make you a more well-rounded person. It's not supposed to be easy as much as it is fulfilling, but thankfully, there are ways to make your educational journey a little less difficult. Luckily for you, a lot has changed since most of the Engadget team went to school. To help out, we've gathered a few apps here that should prove especially useful as you gear up for more long days of learning. (Trust us, you'll probably miss them someday.) Oh, and don't worry: Every one of these handy apps is available for iOS and Android, so everyone gets to benefit.
PhotoMath: Every math student's dream come true
The latest from the "Why didn't they have this when I was in school?" news is a very cool app that scans printed mathematical expressions and then solves them. PhotoMath (free) is every school kid's dream. The app was pointed out by Mike Rose, who saw Amit Chowdry's writeup in Forbes. Apparently the app has a few quirks - Chowdry noted that it sometimes misreads the "X" in an equation as a multiplication symbol - but that still doesn't keep it from doing a great job of solving those equations. The educational benefit? It shows step by step how those equations are being solved so that students can learn the process to go through. When you point the iPhone's camera at a math or science textbook, a red frame appears that you place around the equation. The app uses OCR to grab the equation, then recognizes the type of calculation that is being made. Step by step, it shows how the problem is solved. The PhotoMath OCR capability is designed by London-based Microblink, which plans to use that function for future online banking apps. PhotoMath's description in the App Store notes that additional functionality will be added in future updates.
PhotoMath uses your phone's camera to solve equations
Need a little help getting through your next big math exam? MicroBlink has an app that could help you study more effectively -- perhaps too effectively. Its newly unveiled PhotoMath for iOS and Windows Phone (Android is due in early 2015) uses your smartphone's camera to scan math equations and not only solve them, but show the steps involved. Officially, it's meant to save you time flipping through a textbook to check answers when you're doing homework or cramming for a test. However, there's a concern that this could trivialize learning -- just because it shows you how to solve a problem doesn't mean that the knowledge will actually sink in. And if teachers don't confiscate smartphones at the door, unscrupulous students could cheat when no one is looking. The chances of that happening aren't very high at this stage, but apps like this suggest that schools might have to be vigilant in the future.
