Solving math equations and fractions is not easy if you’re a student and sometimes your teacher’s explanations just sound like Greek and Latin to you. Finding a handy math tutor is no easy task either and its an expensive proposition. That’s why you’ll want to thank PhotoPay Ltd, the team behind a clever little math workout app called PhotoMath. The app, which is available for iOS and Windows Phone devices makes use of the camera to help solve equations and fractions. Let’s see how PhotoMath works.
PhotoMath App Review
There are probably plenty of math apps in the App Store that you have tried to help you in your quest to understand math and solve problems. PhotoMath is an app that truly simplifies the art of solving those problems as it requires absolutely no effort on your part to input those complicated equations into the app.
The app’s camera acts as a scanner letting you place your phone over the math problem in your text book (within a frame) to scan and capture it on to the app. You will have to adjust the view by swiping across the screen to ensure that only the main equation is placed within the frame. You may otherwise not get it scanned correctly leading to probably an incorrect answer.
The result will then appear on the screen and now that you know that x=16 you can click the Steps button to find out exactly how that answer came about in a step by step fashion. The bottom of the app also displays a few key buttons to navigate the app. The History button shows you all your past math scans; The Light button lets you brighten the area around which you want to scan; Steps shows you all the step by step instructions on solving the problem and the Help button is a quick run through of how the app works.
At present the app supports arithmetic expressions, fractions and decimals, powers and roots, and simple linear equations.
PhotoMath: The Good and the Bad
PhotoMath is an app the teachers are probably going to hate and the cheaters are going to love. But as with all things in the world, cheating is only going to leave you a loser at the end of the day. While you can make use of PhotoMath to quickly arrive at answers, it is the step by step process, which is beautifully illustrated that you need to focus on. Once you have understood the problem you can go ahead and work it out yourself in future and use the app to cross check if you’ve got it right!
With that said, you must remember that the app is still just an app, capable of inconsistencies and bugs. In PhotoMath, the problem lies in the fact that it tends to mistake the x variable with the multiplication symbol, but that is an issue that is definitely going to get fixed over time.
If used in the true spirit of study, PhotoMath can be one of the best math app companions to students. The app is available as a free download for iOS and Windows Phone and will become available for Android next year.
Download PhotoMath App for iOS
Download PhotoMath App for Windows Phone
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