Two questions I get all the time:
"What educational AI tools would you recommend for my kid?" "What adaptive apps does Alpha use?"
Many of the apps we've built ourselves aren't publicly accessible yet. Here are ten third-party ones I do recommend.
1. Math Academy @_MathAcademy_
Math Academy is an automated, adaptive math platform that covers grades four through college. It finds gaps, fills them, and gets kids to mastery with (by our team's estimate) about 20% fewer hours than a traditional classroom.
This is one of our favorite apps, as well as our students’ favorites.
One of our Alpha grads is a math major at Stanford. Last fall, she was placed in a math class with a professor who was famously bad (with a thick accent that was difficult to understand, as well). So she spent the quarter using Math Academy, working through the material on her own, and finished with the highest grade in the class.
2. Teach Tales
Our reading philosophy at Alpha is simple: kids learn to love reading by reading what they love.
Sure, it’s important for kids to be exposed to classic literature. But being forced to read highbrow literature as a young teen is often the very thing that makes kids hate reading in the first place. Many of them never bother picking up a novel again.
So, we built Teach Tales to solve this problem.
Teach Tales is an AI-powered story-building platform that turns your kid into the author of their own custom adventures.
teachtales.com
3. Twin Pics
Twin Pics is a gamified prompt engineering tool.
Kids try to match a reference image by writing a precise enough prompt to make AI generate something nearly identical. The closer their AI-generated image gets to the original, the higher their score.
I tried it last week at one of our Test2Pass events. The image was a rainbow-colored unicorn drinking from a rainbow potion against a black background. It sounds simple, but you learn fast that specific communication isn’t such a soft skill anymore.
Prompting AI is a unique skill. Like every skill, it sharpens with practice.
twinpics.ai
4. Fast Math
I will never forget sitting in my bedroom in third grade, my mom drilling me on multiplication tables until I could answer in my sleep. It was painful at the time, but it’s a foundation that’s served me for life.
Most schools don’t do this anymore. The thinking is that calculators handle it, so why bother. The problem is that fluency in basic math is the foundation everything else sits on: algebra, problem solving, and the ability to estimate whether an answer even makes sense.
We built Fast Math to fix this, and it’s such a fun, engaging app that our students ask to play it outside of their academic block.
fastmath.app
5. ChatABC
ChatABC is an AI reading tutor that listens to your child read out loud and gives feedback in real time. It’s designed for high-frequency, low-stress practice; exactly the kind of reps early readers need to build fluency and confidence.
Let me be clear, though. Nothing is more valuable than one-on-one reading time with a caring adult. So please, parents of little kids: read to your kids! Read, read, read.
ChatABC isn’t a replacement for that. It’s a supplement that gives your kid more reps when they want to practice on their own.
6. Khan Academy @khanacademy
This is a classic AI tool that many of you may already be familiar with.
Khan Academy is a Socratic tutor that guides students through problems rather than solving the problems for them. Sal Khan has been a pioneer in self-paced learning for over a decade. The whole design is built to foster independent critical thinking.
7. Membean
Membean is a vocabulary builder that uses spaced repetition: a learning science principle where your brain gets re-exposed to a word right at the moment it’s about to forget it. Even just five minutes a day helps kids learn college-level vocabulary.
membean.com
8. EGUMPP
I’ll be honest: Alpha students have a love-hate relationship with EGUMPP. It drills the formal rules of English (grammar, usage, and mechanics), so some kids find it tedious.
But you can’t write well if you don’t know the rules.
Ultimately, this app is like strength-training for writing: sometimes boring and repetitive, but always effective.
egumpp.com
9. MobyMax
MobyMax is an all-in-one adaptive curriculum for K through eighth grade. It covers every core subject, and its real value is diagnostic, meaning it finds the holes in your kid’s foundation that traditional teaching either missed or moved past too quickly.
At Alpha, this is one of our obsessions: knowing exactly what each student knows and doesn’t know.
If you want to identify the gaps in your kid’s knowledge, this app is for you.
mobymax.com/families
10. Orai
Orai is a public speaking app that gives instant feedback on pacing, filler words, energy, and clarity. It’s not just for kids. It’s good for any adult who wants to get sharper, too.
We use Orai in our public speaking and storytelling training at Alpha. Over and over we’ve seen the importance of public-speaking. Technical knowledge may get your kid in the door, but the ability to communicate determines how far your kid will go once they’re inside.
orai.com
Link to the full podcast episode:
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.