Best Maths Apps for iPad: What a Primary Teacher Actually Uses
As a classroom teacher who still spends more time around iPads than I ever imagined, I've worked through a lot of maths apps looking for the ones that actually earn their place in a week. Not every app does.
Some drill without teaching. Some entertain without any lasting maths. The useful ones sit in the middle: structured enough to teach, engaging enough that pupils will choose them.
What follows is my working set, ten iPad apps I return to across early years and primary, grouped by the pedagogical purpose each one serves rather than ranked one through ten.
If you teach Reception, you'll live mostly in the first group. If you teach Year 5, you'll live mostly in the middle and later ones. Choose by the teaching goal, not by the headline.
Prices change often, so verify in the App Store before you buy anything.
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What I Look For in a Maths App for the Classroom iPad
Three practical questions decide whether an app earns a slot on the trolley. Does the maths actually get done, or does the child spend most of the session on everything that isn't maths?
Does the app pitch itself at a specific developmental stage, or does it try to cover ages 4 to 12 and land nowhere? And can the free version be used as a real teaching tool, or does it stop working the moment I try to assign something?
Those three filters have cut my working list in half. The apps that survive share a common pattern: short, repeated sessions, feedback the child can act on, and some mechanism for me to see what they've been doing. The ten below all pass. The groupings explain why.
For Daily Fact Practice That Children Will Actually Open
The anchor app in this group is MathHero. It's a story-driven game aimed at ages 5 to 10, and the useful thing about it from a teaching standpoint is that the game simply cannot progress without the maths.
Children solve short sets of facts to help characters, build things, and earn items for their own hero. If my Year 2 group is working on subtraction within 20, I set their profiles to that.
If my Year 4s need times tables, I set theirs to the specific tables they're weak on, say, only the sevens and the nines, drawing from MathHero's dedicated multiplication games. The game then builds its sessions around those facts.
The free tier gives five levels a day per child profile. That lands at roughly ten to fifteen minutes, which is a sensible dose for independent practice and happens to match what fact-fluency research suggests.
A subscription removes the daily limit (prices vary by country, so check your App Store). MathHero works offline once installed, which matters when the school Wi-Fi is uncooperative.
Alongside MathHero, two more apps earn space in this group. Monster Math 2 by Makkajai is a side-scrolling adventure that covers facts, factors, multiples, and prime numbers through Year 5.
It's wider in scope than MathHero but less tightly tuned, so I use it for mixed-ability sessions where I want several concepts covered at once.
Prodigy Maths, which runs through Year 8, is my pick for pupils who are reluctant to practise anything. It's structured as a role-playing game and sits closer to entertainment than drill, so I set a timer and keep expectations modest about maths-per-minute.
For the Youngest Learners: Early Number Sense First
Before fact practice makes sense, children need to understand what numbers actually are. Four apps in my rotation sit here.
Khan Academy Kids is the one I'd recommend first for Nursery and Reception.
It's completely free with no advertising and no in-app purchases, and the content stretches from counting and shape recognition through to early addition. The audio prompts walk a non-reader through everything, which matters more than most reviews mention.
Moose Math, now part of the Khan Academy family and also free, teaches counting, addition, subtraction, sorting and geometry across five activities set in a small town the child builds up over time.
Kahoot! Numbers by DragonBox is the one I reach for when a child understands counting but struggles to see what addition actually does. The game turns numbers into little creatures called Nooms.
A two combined with a three visibly becomes a five; a five can be split back into a two and a three.
For a visual learner this clicks in a way worksheets rarely achieve. The app is free to download but requires a Kahoot! Kids subscription for the full content.
Todo Maths by Enuma rounds out this group with a tightly-sequenced curriculum from pre-K through Year 2. It was built originally for children with learning differences, which shows in the clean interface and the single-task-at-a-time pacing. For a Reception child who gets overwhelmed by busy screens, Todo Maths is the gentlest start.
All four apps work best when paired with off-screen practice: counting objects, drawing numerals, chatting about quantities on the walk to school. Screen plus hands-on beats either alone.
For Upper Primary Visualisation and Exploration
Once children reach Year 6 and above, abstract concepts arrive faster than most of us can draw them on a whiteboard. Two free apps carry a disproportionate amount of weight in this stretch.
Desmos is the graphing calculator that has quietly become the standard tool in many secondary classrooms. It runs beautifully on an iPad: pinch to zoom a parabola, drag a slider to see how a coefficient changes the curve, overlay a line of best fit on a scatter plot.
For Year 7 upwards it replaces an expensive handheld graphing calculator and does rather more.
The classroom activities Desmos publishes are free and genuinely useful; many of them need no preparation beyond projecting a code.
GeoGebra sits beside Desmos and does what Desmos doesn't: dynamic geometry alongside algebra. A child can build a triangle, measure the angles, drag a vertex and watch every measurement update live.
The learning curve is real. GeoGebra rewards focused prompts rather than open exploration, so I plan a specific task before the iPad goes out.
For a visual thinker approaching geometry, it makes abstract theorems concrete in a way that textbooks rarely do.
For Rescuing a Stuck Homework Problem
Photomath is in a category of its own. A child points the iPad camera at a handwritten or typed maths problem and the app returns the answer plus a step-by-step method. It covers arithmetic through to calculus, which is wider than anything else here.
The teaching caveat matters. Used as a hint when a child has genuinely tried the problem, Photomath is excellent. It unsticks without hollowing out the learning. Used as an answer machine, it does the opposite.
I introduce it with the same house rule I give parents: attempt first, scan second, read the method, then try the next question alone. The free tier is enough for most families; Photomath Plus adds animated tutorials for a subscription.
A Sample Week of iPad Maths in a Primary Classroom
In my own planning, the iPad sits in the trolley as one station among four or five. A rough week looks like this.
| Day | iPad station app | What I’m doing | Teaching focus |
| Monday | MathHero | Guided group on new content at the table | Daily fact practice |
| Tuesday | Khan Academy Kids or Moose Math | Guided group for the older pupils | Early number sense for younger pupils in mixed-age groups |
| Wednesday | Desmos or GeoGebra, one pair at a time | Short demonstration on the whiteboard | Visualising abstract concepts |
| Thursday | Monster Math 2 or Prodigy Maths | Rotating through small groups | Broader fact practice |
| Friday | Child’s choice from the week | Observing which apps pupils return to | Pupil agency, preference signal |
Photomath isn't a station app. I introduce it to Year 6 as a homework tool when they start algebra and I know the parents at home will not always be able to help. Kahoot! Numbers lives on the Early Years tablets rather than on rotation.
The whole programme assumes short sessions, repeated. Ten to fifteen minutes a day of focused maths-app time, over a term, builds more fluency than a weekly thirty-minute block ever will.
Mistakes I See When Teachers Introduce Maths Apps
Four patterns come up again and again.
The first is choosing by what looks fun rather than what fits the maths. Beautiful graphics do not teach. If the maths within the app isn't rigorous, the child learns to play the app, not the maths.
The second is installing too many apps at once. Three is plenty on a classroom iPad; six becomes decision fatigue for everyone, including the teacher who then needs to track six dashboards. I'd rather pupils use three apps consistently than nine inconsistently.
The third is leaving the free trial on auto-renew. Set a reminder in your phone the day you install anything with a seven-day free trial. The subscription will quietly start otherwise.
The fourth, which is harder to see, is treating the app as the lesson. The app is a station in a lesson, not the lesson itself. The teaching happens in the small groups you run at the table while the station rotates. The iPad buys you the time to do that work.
Best Math Apps for iPad at a Glance
A quick-reference comparison of all ten apps, in the order they appeared above.
| App | Best for (year group) | Teaching purpose | Pricing (verify current) |
| MathHero | Years 1-5 (K-4) | Daily fact fluency, differentiated per child profile | Free at 5 levels/day; subscription for unlimited |
| Monster Math 2 | Years 1-5 | Mixed-concept fact practice through adventure | Free download + optional subscription |
| Prodigy Maths | Years 1-8 | Motivation for reluctant practisers | Free + optional Premium Membership |
| Khan Academy Kids | Nursery to Year 1 | Early counting, shapes, basic concepts | Fully free, no ads |
| Moose Math | Nursery to Year 1 | Early number games, geometry, sorting | Fully free |
| Kahoot! Numbers by DragonBox | Reception to Year 3 | Visualising what numbers do (the Nooms) | Free download + Kahoot! Kids subscription |
| Todo Maths | Pre-K to Year 2 | Structured early curriculum, learning-difference friendly | Free tier + Family subscription |
| Desmos | Year 7 and up | Graphing calculator + interactive activities | Fully free |
| GeoGebra | Year 7 and up | Dynamic geometry alongside algebra | Fully free |
| Photomath | Year 5 and up | Homework rescue with step-by-step method | Free + Photomath Plus subscription |
Prices accurate at the time of writing. Subscriptions move around often, especially in different regions, so check the App Store listing before you commit.
One Final Thought
A maths app on the classroom iPad isn't meant to replace a teacher. It is to free a teacher to teach the children who need her most, whilst the rest of the class practises something useful.
Choose apps that make that possible, keep sessions short, pair them with pencil-and-paper work and real conversations about numbers, and you'll find the iPad trolley stops feeling like a compromise and starts feeling like a genuinely useful tool.
