How do you pick a learning app for kids? Short answer: spend five minutes checking for ads, purchases, chat and data collection, then play one round yourself and ask whether your child is actually thinking. Most of this checklist comes from a handful of studies.
Search "best learning games for kids" and you get a wall of bright icons, every one of them labeled "educational." This guide turns what researchers have found about these apps into a checklist you can run before you download one. We make a kids learning app too, so at the end we hold ours to the same list, including where it falls short.
The short version
Try these before your child ever sees the app. Most of it is on the store listing or in the first couple of minutes of play.
The first five are about safety. The last one is about learning, and it's where the research gets more interesting.
The most useful paper we found was a 2015 review by a group of developmental psychologists who asked what it would take to put the education back in "educational" apps. Their answer was four pillars. Children learn best when they're (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015):
All four serve a clear learning goal. If you can't say what the app is trying to teach, that's a sign in itself.
One honest note: this is a framework, not a test of whether any app works. The authors were critical of most apps labeled "educational." We find it most useful as a checklist, including for our own game.
There's some evidence that good apps can help. A review of 35 controlled studies found learning benefits from interactive apps for early academic skills, especially early math (Griffith et al., 2020). But those children were under 6, many of the studies had quality problems, and the authors called the evidence "emerging." So read it as "apps can help," not "apps do help."
More common than you might expect. One study looked at 135 popular apps for children 5 and under, and 95% of them contained some kind of advertising (Meyer et al., 2019). About a third had pop-up videos that interrupted play, about a third pushed in-app purchases, and some disguised ads as items in the game. Worth knowing: ads were just as common in apps labeled "educational."
A later study tracked the apps that 160 children aged 3 to 5 actually used most, and looked for design meant to keep kids playing or get them to buy something (Radesky et al., 2022). Researchers call these "dark patterns." They were common. They included shiny lures to keep going (in about 45% of apps), screens that made it hard to leave or move on, characters who pressured the child, and time pressure. Children from lower-income households saw more of them.
Both studies were of apps for young children, and both had limits: one sample came from a single app store, the other from 160 families who volunteered. But they're why the five-minute check starts with ads and ends with "does it end?"
A little, and it depends on how they're used. A meta-analysis of gamification, adding points, badges and similar game pieces to learning, found small positive effects (Sailer & Homner, 2020). The effect on learning held up in the most careful studies. The effects on motivation and behavior did not. Pairing competition with working together did especially well.
There's an older, more cautious finding too. A large review of experiments found that expected, tangible rewards for doing a task tended to lower kids' own interest in it, and more so in children than in adults. Positive feedback in words tended to raise it (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999). Whether virtual stars and coins act like real rewards isn't settled. A useful question to ask is whether the rewards tell your child something ("you got 4 of 5") or whether they've become the reason to play.
Some, but less than the marketing implies. A meta-analysis of digital learning games found students learned more with games than without them, by a modest amount (Clark, Tanner-Smith & Killingsworth, 2016). The bigger point in that paper was that design mattered more than the medium. Better-designed games beat simpler versions of themselves. Most of the students in those studies were older kids, though.
Another review found learning games helped kids learn and remember, especially when played over several sessions and in groups, but weren't significantly more motivating than regular teaching (Wouters et al., 2013). "Kids learn more because it's fun" isn't what the research shows. A game can get a kid to sit down and practice. The practice is what does the work.
So when this guide says "best educational games for kids," it means ones that pass the safety check and the four pillars. It doesn't mean ones shown to raise grades. We haven't found a study that shows any single app does that.
It would be easy to write a checklist that only our game passes. So here's where Super Trivia Kids does well, and where it doesn't.
Where we think it holds up. There are no ads, no chat, no online play and no leaderboards. Kids don't have accounts, and the game collects no data from them. The only thing for sale is one $9.99 unlock for more worlds, and it sits behind an adults-only question. Every question asks for an answer, and the right answer shows afterward. Read-aloud on every question helps kids who are still learning to read. For "socially interactive," the game has couch multiplayer on purpose: kids take turns on one device with whoever is sitting next to them. Each level ends with a boss, which gives you a natural place to stop.
Where it falls short.
Common pitfalls: trusting the word "educational," and trusting star ratings, which mostly tell you whether kids like it. Kids like plenty of things that are built to keep them tapping. If you're working out how much time to allow, there's more in screen time rules by age and what the research says about screen time. Every family is different, so take the list and change it.
There isn't one best app for every child. Researchers suggest looking for apps that get a child actively thinking, stay focused on the learning, connect to real life, and involve another person. Then check for ads, in-app purchases, chat and data collection. Studies find well-designed learning games help modestly, and no study shows a single app works for every child.
Some are, but the label doesn't tell you which. A study of 135 popular apps for children 5 and under found 95% contained advertising, and ads were just as common in apps labeled "educational." A review of controlled studies found interactive apps can help early skills like math, though the authors called that evidence emerging.
Start with the store listing. Google Play marks apps that contain ads, and both stores say whether an app has in-app purchases. Then play for a couple of minutes yourself. Watch for pop-up videos, buttons that look like game items but lead elsewhere, and purchase screens a child could reach without an adult.
A little. A meta-analysis found game elements like points and badges had small positive effects on learning, and that effect held up in the most careful studies. The motivation effects did not. Older research also suggests that expected rewards can lower a child's own interest in a task, so rewards work best as feedback, not as the reason to play.
About this article. Written by the Super Trivia Kids team from the published studies listed below. We're not researchers, teachers or doctors. Every source links to the original paper so you can check our reading of it. Where a study was small, or done with a different age group, we've said so. We also make one of the apps this checklist applies to, so read our section on it with that in mind.
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