In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

The app Relationshapes makes it fun and easy for young kids to work on their visual-spatial skills. The brightly-colored app has eight levels of progressively more challenging activities and a multi-touch interface for teachers or parents to join students in activities.

“Open-ended play gives young children opportunities to practice problem-solving and experience visual-spatial reasoning. Geared towards early childhood, RelationShapes allows young users to move and resize shapes on one side of an axis, then create a matching image on the other side. After each level, new shapes and stickers are unlocked to create fun pictures.”

Platform: iOS, Android
Grades: Preschool – Elementary School
Cost: FREE

Teachers With Apps has this very detailed article about Relationshapes that explores several activities and explains the benefits for young students. In this article about spatial learning and STEM, Relationshapes is mentioned as well as several other apps that provide students with a good foundation knowledge that will help them understand STEM concepts in the future.