Take your mental abilities to the next level with Elevate
Elevate - Brain Training (by Elevate, Inc.) is a brain exercising program with the main purpose of improving the user's focus, processing speed, memory, speaking and math skills, as well as their cognitive ability in general. In the past we had reviewed Memorado for iOS, an app with similar functionality which definitely did a good job in exercising your brain. Elevate, just like Memorado, gives personalized tests to match each individual's needs and priorities; thus, everyone who starts using it is first asked to choose what they consider more important and what not. Topics include articulating your thoughts more clearly, improving focus while reading and listening, and many others.
Using Elevate
In order use the app you must create an account, and in order to create an account you must provide your email address, or alternatively, log in with your Facebook account. Afterwards you are asked to provide your age, which is basically the last step before you’re done.
Then you will have the chance to choose the areas of your brain you want give priority to. This selection process is very easy and quick, since all you have to do is simply tap Yes or No on the suggestions. Depending on the choices, a training program is made which adjusts over time to maximize efficiency for the skills you wish to improve at the most.
Every day you will be receiving your daily workouts, and the app makes sure to remind you when you haven't played in case you have forgotten (or got lazy). Speaking of reminders, the app also offers a workout calendar to help the user track his streaks.
As the official site states, users who train at least 4 times per week have reported dramatic gains and increased confidence. As a user myself, I can attest that using Elevate on a daily basis will certainly make you notice how much faster you will go through the tests, and slowly but surely you will see the results showing in you daily life.
App Features
The app includes 25 games for critical cognitive skills like focus, memory, processing, math, precision, and comprehension. The games are divided in 5 categories: Reading, Writing, Listening, Maths, and Speaking. The Listening exercises focus on improving concentration, building and retaining a web of knowledge for various matters, and name recalling. Maths help with organizing prices, learning different systems of measurement, and estimating quickly the costs of products; speaking exercises focus on helping the user remember words faster and improve use of syntax during speech. As far as the reading and writing go, they focus on improving the user's comprehension and ability to avoid errors, as well as be concise during writing.
Each category includes several games, such as Eloquence (helps you choose your words and tone more precisely), Error avoidance (helps you avoid mixing up commonly confused words when writing), Syntax (helps you identify grammatical errors and improve your writing skills), Comprehension (helps you analyse and understand more of what you read), plus many others, namely Memory, Precision, Brevity, Spelling, Context, Synthesis, Discounting, Estimation etc. (the rest you can discover yourself!). Of course, the app offers instructions and displays the difficulty level for each game.
Every day you are allowed to play 3 games. The app chooses the games but you can pick others, if you’re not in the mood for the recommended ones.
Elevate is free, but as I mentioned above, you can only play 3 out of the total 25 games each day. The app offers various workout sessions, but it will take time for the user to come across all of them. If you want unlimited access to all games every day, then you can jump to Elevate Pro. The cost is 4.99 Euros for a monthly subscription or 39.99 Euros for a yearly subscription. Using the free version doesn't keep you out of important features, so my advice is to get the Pro version only if you have had Elevate for a long time and you want to have unlimited access to it.
One more feature in Elevate is performance rankings. After you have completed a game, you are given statistics that inform you of how you did. For new users it states that your ranking among other users won't be high even if you do well (obviously). The rankings give you a glimpse of what other users have achieved, and instead of feeling useless you should feel motivated to try harder because high rankings are proof of the app’s effective job.
Elevate Screenshots
The graphics are top-notch and the whole design is just eye candy. The test icons appear on a vertical line on the left side. You can check the games, your performance and settings by tapping on the icon located at the top left of the screen, which opens a sliding menu. The sound effects are also very clear and the voices in the listening exercises are also of high quality.
Conclusion and small comparison with Memorado
All in all, I would recommend everyone to download and try out Elevate. It provides an entertaining way of improving various brain abilities and will definitely help you in the long run. In addition, it will help you a lot with English if you're not a native English speaker since it focuses highly on English grammar and syntax errors. So, if you're interested in apps that offer educational content and increase productivity and mental performance, then this is a highly recommended app.
To give a brief comparison with Memorado, Elevate focuses more on training linguistic abilities than Memorado and has more games (25 versus 10 in the free version), even though the latter has more levels and a more detailed training schedule. Both of them, however, have a lot of similarities and in the end, it all comes down to the user's personal taste.
Elevate is available (for free) for iOS and Android devices:
