You’re seated at home and your child, brother, sister or niece comes home with a homework problem. What do you do? Assuming you don’t know the answer, you Google it. Problem solved. Right? Wrong! You need to explain to them. Teach the child to fish, so to speak. When I came across this app called Socratic, by Google, I knew this was it.

I have a love-hate relationship with Math. On one hand, I love the psychology behind math. The benefits of it, the statistics, the formulas, the fluidity of the numbers. It’s quite the thrill.

Unfortunately, you have to work hard when it comes to math. You have to study and constantly practice. It’s a lot of work but it’s definitely worth it. What if I could tell you there’s an app that tries to reduce your workload. It’s called Socratic.

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Socratic by Google

Whenever we would have a math exam, our teachers would always say that you should ‘show your work’. You had to show your formulas and calculations throughout the sum. Now we’ve got Google on our side again. It’s nice to see the big companies get into the education space.

What we like about it…

Socratic is an app with a cool concept. You input a problem and the app helps you solve it. The app even gives you a step-by-step tutorial on how to solve it. You ask it a question from any of the subjects they offer and you’ll get a myriad of answers and explanations.

It’s excellent because you get the answer you need, but also instructions on how to get it next time. That’s not even the best part. The app supports a wide variety of  subjects including:

Subjects Offered:

• Biology
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Earth and Environmental Science
• History
• Mathematics
• Literature
• Poetry and Drama

The app is free and easy to use. The UI is simple and the colours are interactive.

You can use your voice or camera to connect to online resources and understand any problem. They have classes from YouTube as well where you can find videos, step-by-step explanations, and more to learn subjects at your own pace.

Socratic partnered with teachers and experts to bring you visual explanations in each subject, so you can learn the concepts behind any problem.

What we don’t like about it…

It is a good app but improvements are still needed on the typing/response. It often doesn’t respond to the typing of questions. The camera features have to be fixed too. Socratic sometimes can’t grab a full shot of a question or a full-page of a book as advertised.

It doesn’t yet really “solve” certain problems, in the way that Microsoft’s Math app does. It brings up extremely similar examples that one can extrapolate to find a solution

I’m also a bit disappointed that it doesn’t have additional features as compared to a basic browser. No possibility to save the search terms or take notes.

So far so good.

Gadgets Africa Rating: 3.8/5