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The best math apps for high school, by what they're actually for
Most "best math app" lists rank apps as if they all did the same job. They don't. A graphing calculator, a video course and an answer scanner help in completely different ways, and one of those ways can quietly stop a student learning. Pick by the job.
Graphing: Desmos or GeoGebra
Both are free and run in a browser. Desmos is the one many classes and tests use (the digital SAT has it built in), so it's worth getting fluent in. GeoGebra does graphing plus geometry constructions. Either one makes a function's shape obvious in a way a table of values never does.
Learning a topic from the start: Khan Academy
Free video lessons and practice, organised by course from pre-algebra to calculus. The best place to go back to a unit that never made sense, or to fill a gap from an earlier year. Less suited to the one problem that's due tomorrow morning.
Checking finished work: answer apps
Photomath, Mathway, Symbolab and Wolfram|Alpha take a problem and show the full worked solution. That's genuinely useful for checking a problem already done by hand. Used before trying, it does the practice for the student, and the first real attempt ends up happening on the test.
Getting unstuck without being handed the answer: a tutor that asks
The help that teaches is the kind that looks at the student's own working, points at the step that went wrong, and asks a question. A good human tutor does this. So do AI tutors built not to give answers, such as Khanmigo (Khan Academy's) and theoremEd. The test of any of them: after using it, can the student do a similar problem alone on blank paper?
Before a test: practice that finds the gaps
Mixed practice on the actual unit beats rereading notes. Khan Academy's unit tests, the textbook's chapter review, or a quiz built from the problems the student actually worked on all do this.
A simple setup that covers everything
- Desmos for anything with a graph.
- Khan Academy for re-learning a topic.
- One tutor that asks instead of tells for the nights they're stuck.
- Answer apps only for checking finished work.
Where theoremEd fits
theoremEd is the third one. It sits beside the homework in Chrome (school Chromebooks included) or on a Mac, or runs in a phone's browser, reads the problem, finds the first line that went wrong and asks one question at a time. It never gives the answer, it can graph, and it quizzes the student on their own units before a test. Free to try, no account.