As I'm looking to get into the field of middle school teaching, in the realm of history (social studies), I figured I would choose three apps from the social studies section and review them. The three apps I chose to review are: This Day in History, Stack the States, and Your World.
App #1: This Day in History
I selected this app because I have always loved the little block of information on Wikipedia that is titled the same thing. Knowing what happened on this particular day hundreds to thousands of years ago is kind of fascinating. And while this app is very simplistic and basic in what it offers, that information can easily be used in the classroom. Loading up the app brings you a list of events that happened today throughout history. For example, as today is May 18, on this day in 1652, Rhode Island passed the very first law in English-speaking North America making slavery illegal. Also, on May 18, 1756, the Seven Years' War began when Britain declared war on France.
This is a neat bunch of info, and it literally gives you hundreds of events that happened on a specific day. One of the projects that I thought would be interesting for a classroom would be for every student to use this app to find out what happened throughout history on their birthday. Since you can use this app to find events for every single day, and not just the current day, I thought it would be a fun connection for the students to see how their special day lines up with events in history.
For example, my birthday is February 9. On February 9, 1895, the sport that would eventually become Volleyball was created. Also of extreme importance to me, and something I was unaware of until I found this app, is that The Beatles made their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on Feb 9, 1964, which was their first performance in America and broke American television records with an audience of 73 million viewers. I love the Beatles, but did not know this event was connected to my birthday!
There are other cool events that happened on my birthday, and that is just one of the project ideas we can employ that would use this app.
App #2: Stack the States
This is a game-like app in which the user is supposed to be able to identify the shapes of each state. The question comes up "Which one of these is Alaska?" And then it gives you a few options of state silhouettes to choose from. Selecting the right one allows you to place that state on a little platform, where your goal is to stack the states above a certain height line, which completes the level and allows you to progress further. It is similar to Tetris, in a way, but instead of trying to stack them in rows to make them disappear, you must stack them higher and higher to get above the line, while ensuring that you've stacked them evenly enough so that they do not fall over and off of the platform!
This is a fun little game that students can play that will help them to identify the 50 states better. There is also a country version of the game, as well, if you are doing world geography.
App #3: Your World
Your World is a neat little globe game in which you must go around the globe and place silhouettes of each country onto where it is located. One of the biggest issues I had with Your World is that it lets you place the initial 40 or so countries onto the globe, but then prompts you to upgrade to the "full version" for $3.99. So no, it isn't free. But it is fun, and I enjoyed the brief interaction I had with it on my home iPad.
One of the coolest things about Your World is that whenever you are placing a country, you can tap a button with a giant W at the top right of the screen and it will take you to the Wikipedia page for that country, which has loads of information. It does this for every country. And while some of the smaller nations of the world aren't included in this game (as they would be too hard to see on the global map), many of the large and medium sized countries are all there for the students to find and learn about. This would be a good game app for a world geography class to play. Just be aware that the game is not free.
Well done!
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