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Article in App of the Week category.
Sharpen Your STEM Skills on the Go With Brilliant
Brush up on your algebra skills, solve logic problems, learn about astronomy and more with Brilliant, the app that makes STEM education way less scary.
Attention right-brained people! This app will help you sharpen your STEM skills with bite-sized problems, quizzes, and lessons.
Brilliant feels like the lovechild of Lumosity and Khan Academy: the app is mainly educational, but it uses short, fun bits of learning activities like brain training apps. The topics covered by Brilliant are math, science, and computer science, with focus on the more specific aspects like logic, physics, astronomy, neural networks, etc (quantum computing coming soon!).
Brilliant has a pretty decent supply of STEM courses, a ton of practice quizzes, questions of the week ranging from beginner to advanced, and even a community forum where users can post their own problems. The app also exists as a website, but I found the mobile experience to be a better fit.
The app is free to download, with free access to each course’s Introduction pack, but if you want to unlock all the fun, you’ll need to fork over $8 per month for an annual subscription, $24 per month sans commitment, or a hefty $600 for a lifetime subscription. You can also give a one-month subscription as a gift for $25 or one year for $120, so for those of you who can’t think of anything to get your smartphone-addicted Gen Z relative this holiday season, Brilliant could be the way to go.
Brilliant was created by a bunch of awesome nerds who aim to cultivate a world of better learners, thinkers, and problem solvers, and while they’re definitely making a few bucks doing so (especially from the users who found it necessary to go with the lifetime subscription), it’s obvious that their main goal is to take the scaries out of STEM. And as someone who will avoid doing basic mathematics at all costs, I found Brilliant to be a great confidence-booster.
Next time you find yourself scrolling endlessly through Instagram, or if you need to take a break from your news app after an intense week of election results, feed your hungry brain with Brilliant.
But enough about other people's apps.