The science app is called ElementTrek and can be found in the app store for free.

Today I am here to judge this app according to my 6 questions.

1. Is it good for beginners?

2. What information does it contain?

3. Is it organized? Understandable?

4. Does it teach something?

5. Is it useful? How?

6.Is it distracting?

So first of all, if you only look at the main page of the app then all you’d see would be the periodic table of element which would only include the info of the element symbol, name and atomic number. So the front page would be great for beginners but honestly the app contains lots of information that is for students that are advanced in chemistry. But because we went through chemistry and covered the basics it is partially understandable.

Like I said, it contains a lot of information. Its an information overload I can imagine it would be helpful for older students but only a quarter of the information applies to what we’ve learned. So it obviously contains everything that the periodic table would. The element names, symbols, atomic number, mass. It also has specific information about the alkaline metals and the other 3 families. It contains models of the ion and atom. Information of the chemical and physical properties and more. There are a lot of big fancy words here and there.

Because of the information overload its hard to find your way around and is very easy to get lost. If you take your time though, it will be much easier for you to see that in fact it is very organized. Many different screens for you to explore.

It honestly doesn’t teach anything, like I said its more for people who really understand chemistry and its elements. Unless you consider teaching memorizing instead of understanding then it will be good for chemistry’s intro to the periodic table of elements.

So for example if you were to have a sheet of homework due about basic things like atomic number it’d be easy to find and very useful. But if you would want to know more about the Bohr Model of an element then it would be harder to find and in the end I guess it still is very useful for finding information just it doesn’t do much for teaching, like I’ve mentioned.

As it does help with homework it could distract very easily. There are sound effects and colour changes and models that move so in the end it is very interactive but also could get really distracting. Also it is electronic, its free, no internet connection needed but we have other games on our phone we have text messages from friends and its natural to get distracted.

So to conclude, is it really a good app to use for chemistry?

Well it could be useful at times and it really depends on your knowledge but, I believe that we should not learn to depend on electronics everyday but that’s what this world is doing and not many people are actually capable of learning that way. There are too many distractions and an information overload for the newbies. So, older students, if you understand it go ahead, use it, it’s a time saver, otherwise, in my opinion, you shouldn’t.

Thanks,

Karolina

To read more about Element Trek from another website:

http://www.geekwithenvy.com/2013/09/featured-app-element-trek/