Bottom Line: More than 500 real, rotatable photographs and Theodore Gray's funny, knowledgeable writing make this the best way to browse the periodic table on a screen. The 1.7 GB download and a layout that clearly favors the iPad are the only real drawbacks.
The Core Idea: Objects Before Abstractions
Chemistry education has a long-standing problem. The periodic table is a set of abstractions: symbols, numbers, electron shells. Most students never connect those abstractions to physical things. The Elements attacks that gap directly. Before you read a word about bismuth, you've already seen its iridescent, stair-stepped crystals rotating on the screen. The object comes first and the explanation second. That order is the app's central design choice, and it's the right one.
Its strength is how much physical material it shows for each element. Gray doesn't stop at a pure sample. He also shows the minerals an element is refined from and the everyday products that contain it. Each element becomes a small story that runs from the ground, through the refinery, to your kitchen drawer. That context is what printed tables and most competing apps leave out.
Interaction Model: Touch as Curiosity
The main interaction is direct manipulation. You don't press a "rotate" button. You grab the object and turn it. Pinch-zoom lets you move from a whole ingot to its surface texture. This is the rare educational app where the touch interface isn't just a way to navigate. Touching the object is how you learn about it. Turning a sample to catch the light on its surface teaches more about metallic luster than a sentence about luster ever could.
The flow from table to element page is shallow and easy to read. You tap an element and land on its page. The stories and the data sit together, so a student looking up a melting point for homework will also run into a paragraph about why that melting point matters. That accidental learning is where the app pays off. It rewards wandering.
The Writing Carries the Load
Gorgeous photography with dull writing would have made this a screensaver. Gray's text keeps it from becoming one. His voice is curious, funny and confident. He writes like someone who actually owns and handles these samples, not someone summarizing an encyclopedia. The digital format also helps the text: it sits next to objects you can move, so it never has to describe what the image already shows. Reviewers often cite the writing as the reason the app beats the printed book, and I agree.
Where It Stops Short
This is a reference work, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. There's no structured learning path, no progress tracking and no assessment layer. Teachers who want a tool that drills students on electron configurations will have to look elsewhere. The app sparks curiosity. It doesn't grade it. For a self-directed learner that's fine. For a curriculum-driven classroom, it's a supplement at best.
The property data is also reference-grade rather than exploratory. You can read an element's electronegativity, but the app doesn't let you compare it across the table. There's no heat map or graph showing how a property changes along a row. That's a missed opportunity for an app whose home screen is already a table, and it's the clearest place where the book's origins limit what the software could do.
Stereoscopic 3D: Novelty With a Point
The stereoscopic 3D mode could easily have been a gimmick. Here it has a real reason to exist, because the whole premise of the app is that these are real physical objects. Adding depth reinforces that. It won't be how most people use the app day to day, but it's a well-chosen extra, not a checkbox feature.
