9 Teacher-Tested Apps to Enhance Math Instruction

Math captivates some students, but for many others, the subject can feel hopelessly abstract, boring, or downright nerve-wracking—especially if students have trouble visualizing possible solutions or struggle with the motivation to keep going when the work gets hard.

Luckily, modern math teachers have a wide range of digital tools they can use to help make the subject more accessible and engaging—for example, online graphing calculators that make functions visual and interactive, platforms that offer virtual math manipulatives like number cubes and spinners, and games that use challenging algebra problems to foster friendly competition. There are countless online tools that can enhance everyday instruction.

We recently asked math educators in our community to share the tools that have become their go-to resources—and received hundreds of responses, spanning all grade levels.

Desmos

By far the most popular tool among our community was Desmos, receiving a shout-out from a quarter of all respondents. Desmos is perhaps best known for its highly interactive 2D graphing calculator, where students can easily plot multiple functions on the coordinate plane and add sliders to see how changing certain variables would affect the graph.

Desmos also offers an advanced scientific calculator, a 3D graphing calculator for multivariable calculus, and a geometry interface where students can plot and manipulate various shapes and angles.

When teaching students about functions for the first time, educators find it useful for students to experiment with plotting functions using Desmos. “It’s great to just use the simple graphing functions (and use the sliders) to have kids explore transformations of quadratics,” one teacher commented on Reddit.

Desmos Classroom, a newer offering, provides teachers with engaging math activities, many of which take advantage of Desmos’s interactive graphing interface. As a warm-up activity, math teacher Kristen Smith has her high school students answer a Fermi estimation problem, such as “Estimate how many Walmart stores there are in Connecticut.” Students in her class enter their estimates, see the responses of peers populate in a box plot on their screens, and have an opportunity to tweak their own before providing a rationale for their final decision. 

Smith says the Classroom Data Collection Screen function of Desmos enhances this activity because it “makes it easy to collect student responses and for students to see the range of different answers within the classroom”—data that informs their decision-making and later group discussions.

IXL

IXL was the second-most popular recommendation from our audience, largely due to its vast offering of standards-aligned math activities. From pre-K through calculus, these activities combine short video lessons with practice problems. The “Geometry” tab alone, for example, has lessons tied to 300 different skills; under “Circles,” teachers can find lessons ranging from “Arc length” and “Tangent lines” to “Inscribed angles.”

As students complete a set of practice problems in IXL, the questions adapt to their skill level, automatically becoming simpler or more challenging. IXL “works well for independent work time and individualized instruction,” comments Soma Kaplan on Facebook, while Instagram user rosebud646 says it’s “a game changer for reinforcing concepts.”

Despite the tool’s popularity, IXL received some criticism for its harsh grading system; if a student gets one question wrong, the algorithm deducts points for the lesson and makes them complete additional problems to raise their score. Educator Vicki Davis suggests using the number of problems correct or another measure as a grade, instead of IXL’s SmartScore.

Edpuzzle

If you’ve ever wanted to tailor a YouTube video to your classroom, Edpuzzle is your tool. The platform allows teachers to remix existing videos and embed questions that pop up during key moments, in addition to enabling educators to record their own videos or draw from a library of standards-aligned video lessons created by the platform.

For example, educator Stephanie Carter used Edpuzzle’s search feature to find a video on exponents from the Math Antics YouTube channel and then embedded her own custom practice problems throughout the video. Teachers who like Carter’s submission to the platform are free to use it, or they can tweak the embedded practice problems to suit their own needs.

Math teachers can find hundreds of free videos on the Edpuzzle platform customized by peers—that they can further customize to their own needs—spanning all grade levels, such as a lesson on the different kinds of triangles or one on factoring trinomials.

Blooket

If you’re looking for a way to motivate students to tackle challenging problems, use Blooket to fire them up with a bit of friendly competition. The platform lets teachers choose a math question set—or generate their own—and invite students to a virtual game room.

Game modes include multiplayer options like “Crypto Hack,” where students answer problems to hack and steal points from other players, or “Café,” where students answer questions to serve customers and unlock kitchen upgrades. Other modes can be played solo. Data is shared on how students perform on each question, allowing teachers to assess their students’ understanding of concepts in a manner that is fun and collaborative.

Early childhood educator Heather Sanderell says she uses Blooket for guided practice, content review, or station rotations. “One of my favorite ways to use Blooket was to review fractions and math facts,” Sanderell says, adding that “students had so much fun with this that they asked to do more math fact reviews—they didn’t want to stop.”

Polypad

Manipulatives are a critical component of early math classrooms because they “help students develop conceptual understanding by empowering them to build concrete models of abstract ideas,” writes math educator Nell McAnelly. While physical manipulatives are great for helping students get a hands-on understanding, digital platforms can offer a wider, more accessible range of options for them to use.

In our community, Polypad was the preferred online tool, as it provides an expansive collection of interactive manipulatives—such as number cubes, fraction bars, dice, and spinners. It also offers a balance scale that lets students drag weights from one side to the other, digital rulers and protractors, and draggable logic gates like “and” and “or” that introduce students to the fundamentals of coding. Educator shannann89 on Instagram says that Polypad’s clear and interactive visual offerings help “create so many lightbulb moments” in her classroom.

DeltaMath

Middle school and high school math teachers say they like using DeltaMath to distribute problem sets for students—either as homework or during independent learning—that often require them to plot points or functions on graphs, fill in tables, and more.

Teachers like Carolyn Woodland Briles on Facebook say the tool is particularly helpful at making complicated math concepts clearer: “Seeing that the area under the curve after u-substitution looks like the area under the original curve is a game changer when teaching integration,” Woodland Briles writes.

Teachers can have all students complete the same problems, or they can customize the problem sets to particular needs for differentiated learning by either selecting from DeltaMath’s preexisting problems or creating their own. As students complete each problem, they get a detailed explanation of anything they got wrong (or right)—and DeltaMath provides teachers with a record of student progress, as well as recommendations on skills that students should practice further.

Prodigy

To engage elementary and middle school students, educators recommend Prodigy, which uses a fun, immersive game that gets students practicing math on the journey to catch various friendly creatures (similar to Pokémon).

As students play, they encounter standards-aligned problems that adapt to their skill level or custom problems from their teacher. The platform reports back to teachers on their students’ progress and their comprehension of skills like “measurement” or “mixed operations,” which can inform further instruction.

Math teacher Scott Newcomb says that Prodigy “motivates students to take control of their learning” and “allows them to challenge themselves at their own pace.” Meanwhile, educator Brittney Paige appreciates that Prodigy automatically gives students problems aligned with the concepts that they struggled with in the game’s preassessment phase.

Pear Deck

Pear Deck has long been useful as a tool to help teachers create interactive presentations. Math teachers in our community use it to create slides (either from scratch or using Pear Deck’s premade templates) and throughout them embed relevant math questions, which students can solve via annotation on their own devices or by clicking the correct multiple-choice option. Having students answer these questions in real time offers teachers “detailed student input throughout a lesson,” notes high school teacher Lauren Gehr, which educators can use “to inform their future instruction and assessment.”

A new, artificial intelligence–powered Pear Deck feature allows teachers to type in a prompt for a lesson idea, choose a grade level, and produce a rough-draft presentation complete with practice questions in under a minute, which they can then adjust.

A few teachers also recommended Pear Practice, which offers gamified activities on topics from across K–12 math that students can solve collaboratively or alone. Meanwhile, Pear Assessment can be used to send differentiated problem sets to students and receive feedback on individual and classroom progress.

Reflex

Early in their education, it’s important for math students to develop basic fact fluency. “When students have a strong foundation in basic math skills, they can navigate complex problems with ease” and “apply and transfer procedures and skills accurately and easily to new concepts,” writes math educator Kurt Stielow. Yet developing math fluency can sometimes feel like a slog. (Remember memorizing the times tables in grade school?)

To rectify that, some teachers in our community turn to Reflex—a game-based platform that helps elementary school students become more fluent with mathematical fundamentals like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. During animated missions, kids quickly solve basic math questions—like 6 x 3 or 18 ÷ 2—in order to steer a boat across a river or help a ninja stealthily climb a mountain. As students improve their skills, the problems become more challenging.