7 Best Focus Improvement Apps For Students That Actually Train Attention

You watch your child sit down to do their homework, and within minutes, you see it. The leg starts jiggling, the eyes drift towards the window, and the pencil-tapping begins. In a world filled with digital distractions, teaching our kids how to focus feels like an uphill battle, and it’s easy to blame the very devices they hold in their hands. But what if those same devices could be part of the solution?

How Digital Tools Can Actually Build Attention

It’s a fair question: how can a screen, often the source of distraction, possibly build focus? The key is understanding the difference between passive consumption and active training. Mindlessly scrolling through videos is the cognitive equivalent of junk food, whereas a well-designed app acts more like a targeted workout for the brain.

A child’s ability to pay attention, manage impulses, and stay on task is a set of skills known as executive function. These skills aren’t fixed; they are like muscles that can be strengthened with the right kind of practice. The best focus apps provide this practice in a structured, engaging, and often gamified way, meeting kids where they are.

It’s important to frame these tools correctly for your child and yourself. They are not magic wands that will instantly create a perfectly focused student. Instead, they are powerful supplements to a healthy routine of good sleep, proper nutrition, and clear expectations. The goal isn’t just to get a high score in a game, but to build transferable skills that help a child manage their own attention in the classroom and beyond.

Forest: Gamifying the Pomodoro Technique

You’ve asked your teen to work on their history essay for 30 minutes, but a quick peek shows them scrolling through social media. The battle over "phone-free" study time is a classic. Forest offers a wonderfully simple and effective solution by flipping the script: it uses the phone to enforce being off the phone.

The concept is brilliant. The student decides on a focus interval—say, 25 minutes—and plants a virtual seed in the app. As long as they stay in the Forest app, the seed grows into a beautiful tree. But if they navigate away to check messages or browse the web, the tree withers and dies. This small, visual consequence is surprisingly powerful.

This app scales beautifully across different age groups. For an 8-year-old, the joy of growing a diverse, colorful forest is a tangible reward for finishing a worksheet. For a high schooler, a dense forest becomes a badge of honor, a visual record of their productive hours. The skill being trained is task initiation and sustained focus, making it a perfect entry point for students learning to manage their own time.

Headspace for Kids: Mindfulness for Focus

Does your child’s mind seem to be running a mile a minute? In our fast-paced world, kids are often overstimulated, making it difficult to quiet the internal noise and concentrate on a single task. Headspace for Kids is designed to teach them how to do just that through the practice of mindfulness.

This isn’t about forcing a child to sit still and "empty their mind." Instead, it uses short, engaging, and age-appropriate guided audio exercises. For the 5-7 age group, this might mean simple breathing activities or "listening games" that train them to notice sounds around them. For older kids and tweens, the sessions address more complex feelings like stress or frustration, which are common roadblocks to focus.

By practicing mindfulness, students are building metacognition—the ability to recognize their own thought patterns. When a child can identify the feeling of "I’m distracted" or "I’m feeling anxious," they can then consciously choose a strategy to re-center themselves. Headspace provides the foundational training for this crucial self-awareness, which is a superpower for learning.

EndeavorRx: A Prescribed Game for ADHD

This next tool is in a completely different category, and it’s vital that parents understand this distinction. EndeavorRx is not a general wellness app; it is an FDA-authorized medical device, available only by prescription, for improving attention function in children ages 8-17 with primarily inattentive or combined-type ADHD.

Developed by neuroscientists, EndeavorRx is a video game designed to directly challenge and improve the neural networks related to attention. Through an immersive and adaptive gameplay experience, it requires players to multitask and filter out distractions, essentially providing a high-intensity workout for specific cognitive functions. The difficulty adjusts in real-time to constantly push the child’s abilities.

This is not a tool to be tried casually. It is a therapeutic intervention that should be considered as part of a comprehensive treatment plan under the guidance of a doctor. It represents a significant step forward in digital therapeutics, using game mechanics to target specific neurological functions in a way that traditional methods may not. If your child has a diagnosed attention disorder, this is a conversation worth having with their pediatrician.

CogniFit: Cognitive Training for Students

If you suspect your child’s focus issues are linked to other underlying cognitive skills—like how well they can hold information in their head (working memory) or how quickly they process what they see—CogniFit is a tool worth exploring. It functions like a comprehensive assessment and training center for the brain.

The process begins with an initial assessment that measures over 20 different cognitive abilities, providing a detailed profile of your child’s strengths and weaknesses. Based on these results, CogniFit creates a personalized training program of engaging, science-based games. This data-driven approach is best suited for older students, typically 10 and up, who can appreciate the challenge and are motivated by tracking their progress over time.

The goal here is to strengthen the fundamental building blocks of concentration. A strong working memory, for instance, allows a student to remember a teacher’s multi-step instructions without having to ask for them to be repeated. By improving these core cognitive functions, CogniFit aims to free up a child’s mental resources, making it easier for them to sustain focus on complex academic tasks.

Lumosity: Daily Brain Games for Attention

Lumosity is one of the most recognized names in the "brain training" space, offering a friendly and accessible on-ramp to cognitive exercise. While less clinical than CogniFit, its library of quick, puzzle-like games provides daily practice in skills like problem-solving, memory, and, of course, attention.

The app’s appeal lies in its simplicity and variety. The games are designed to be played in just a few minutes a day, making it easy to build a consistent habit. This format is great for students aged 10 and older who enjoy a daily challenge but might be intimidated by a more intensive program. It feels less like training and more like a fun mental warm-up.

Many of Lumosity’s games directly target selective attention and cognitive flexibility. For example, a game might require a player to track multiple moving objects or quickly switch between two different sets of rules. While the direct, one-to-one transfer of this skill to doing a math worksheet is a subject of scientific debate, the act of regularly and intentionally directing one’s focus is an undeniably valuable mental exercise.

Focus@Will: Music to Improve Concentration

The debate over listening to music while studying is a common one in many households. Some students find it essential, while others find it a complete distraction. Focus@Will is built on the science that the right kind of audio can actually help the brain tune out distractions and achieve a state of deep concentration, or "flow."

This isn’t just a curated playlist of popular songs. Focus@Will provides scientifically designed, instrumental music and soundscapes that are sequenced to be just interesting enough to keep your mind from wandering, but not so interesting that the music itself becomes the focus. Users can choose from different genres and energy levels to match their brain type and the task they’re working on.

This tool is excellent for students who are easily distracted by ambient noise in a busy household or who find complete silence to be unsettling. It helps them create a consistent "auditory bubble" that signals to their brain it’s time to work. In essence, it helps train the brain’s ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli and sustain attention on the task at hand.

Brili: Building Student Focus with Routines

For many kids, especially in the 5-10 age range, the root of inattention isn’t an inability to concentrate—it’s being overwhelmed. The sheer number of steps in a morning or homework routine can cause a child’s brain to stall, leading to distraction and procrastination. Brili tackles this problem head-on by making routines visual, predictable, and manageable.

Brili allows parents to create step-by-step, timed routines for any part of the day. For the "After-School" routine, steps might include "Unpack Backpack," "Have a Snack," and "Work on Math Sheet." Each task is displayed with a picture and a countdown timer, guiding the child from one step to the next without constant verbal reminders.

This app is a powerhouse for building executive function skills like task initiation, sequencing, and time management. By externalizing the entire process, Brili reduces the cognitive load on a child, freeing up their mental energy to focus on the actual task instead of worrying about what comes next. It masterfully builds the foundational habits of organization and follow-through that are essential for lifelong learning.

Choosing the right app is about matching the tool to your child’s specific needs and developmental stage. These digital aids are not a substitute for consistent parenting and healthy habits, but they can be incredibly effective partners in the process. By using them thoughtfully, you can empower your child to build one of the most valuable skills they will ever possess: the ability to command their own focus.