Knowledge Nova App Review
App Name: Knowledge Nova
Overall Rating: 4/5
Mom’s Rating: 3/5
Kids’ Rating: 4/5
Recommended Grades/Ages: Junior High, High School
Skills Developed: History, Art History, US Presidents, States, Capitals, Word Scramble (Spelling), World Capitals
Available On/Price: Universal (iPhone/iPod/iPad) – 4 packs free with 5 more packs available for $0.99 in-app purchase
Reviewed on: iPad
App Description:
Knowledge Nova is an educational app with an old-school vibe complete with stars streaming towards you and old school computer game theme music. Players first select the level they’d like to play, difficulty level etc. in the options. Then press done, and it’s into the world of a sun that is about to super-nova! A picture or word will appear in the center of the sun, and around the sun rotate the possible answers.
After tapping the image in the center and the correct answer in the ring you hit the ‘explode’ button. If your answer is right the sun either expands if you’re right, or shrinks if you’re wrong. As time goes on additional questions are added in the middle of the sun, and once the sun shrinks to the edges of the figures in the middle it will explode! Whew, quite the motivation.
The harder the level the faster new questions will be added, and the quicker the sun will shrink (if you take too long to answer questions it will shrink whether you’ve put in a wrong answer or not). A streak statistic in the lower corner of the screen displays how many questions you’ve correctly answered in a row.
This app teaches through trial and error – even if your child doesn’t already know the answer to the question, your guessing and negative feedback (the sun shrinking) will soon help your child to remember the facts the level focuses on. None of the questions and answers are read, so your child will need to be an independent reader to use this app.
The free download comes with: President Successor, President Names, States and Capitals and States Names. Expansion pack one is available for in-app purchase of $0.99 and includes Artist and Artwork, Five Letter Word Jumble, Six Letter Word Jumble, Seven Letter Word Jumble, and World Capitals.
Levels can be set to easy, normal, or hard, music and sound effects can be toggled on and off. While in the game you can also access the options to restart the level, return to the main menu, and toggle the music and effects.
Other Notes: This app doesn’t include any external links/social media integration or ads. It does include an in-app purchasing option.
What We Liked:
Once you get going in Knowledge Nova the pace and energy can be quite frenetic. My oldest and I played this app together and had a blast exposing our lack of art history knowledge in the Artist and Artwork level. Okay – I’ll admit, I did know the answers to a few and talked to my daughter as we played, explaining my choices, “I think this Bible was painted by Van Gogh – he did train to be a priest you know.”
As a Canadian some of the levels just totally blew me out of the water (President Successor!), but we did okay on States Names, President Names, and some others. Sometimes our sun exploded, sometimes we saved it, but we had a lot of fun hooting and shouting out answers in the process.
This app is a bit tough for my 3rd grader (the vocabulary in the word jumbles is higher level and includes some foreign language source words like theta, kappa, amigo, medical vocabulary like renal, tibia etc. – hence my junior/senior high age rating) but I thought I’d get her to try some of the geography levels since they can be used with anyone learning US and world geography. When she plays it alone she gives it 3 Apples, but when we play it together as a team effort game to save the sun, well – she gives it 5 Apples then (her average rating of 4 Apples is shown above).
The old-school design is a bit cheesy at times, but it can also be part of the fun if you can dig it.
What We Didn’t Like:
While this app can certainly be used for younger children, the word jumble lists aren’t screened for child-friendly vocabulary, so your child might find ‘harem’ in there (I spotted a few others too). That being said, I didn’t spot any nudes in the Artist and Artwork section.
The levels are rather long – even for an adult. I counted 55 words that needed to be solved in one of the Word Jumble levels, and the others are just as long. It would also be nice if the score was more traditionally tallied and not reliant upon consecutive correct answers (streaks) and if this was recorded as a high score within the app itself.
Overall:
Knowledge Nova is a straight forward (and sort of funny) way to tackle the memorization of US history, geography, world geography, art history facts, and even has a dash of spelling thrown in with word unscrambling. With four levels included for free relating to the US. Presidents, states, and capitals it’s definitely worth a free download to check this out as an independent activity or as a family game team effort.
Download this universal (iPhone/iPod/iPad) app now for free (expansion pack one optional – $0.99 through in-app purchase)!
Have you downloaded this app? Let us know what you and your children thought – leave a comment!
Featured Sponsor
About Me
For homeschoolers, by a homeschooler. I'm Jennifer Bogart, a homeschooling mom of four, 8 months - 8 years. I'm an app-loving, aspiring geek dedicated to helping you hunt down the best homeschooling apps for your children. There are a lot of apps out there, let me help you narrow them down. 
