With a more widespread adoption of mobile technologies in society and particularly by youth, educators are now looking for opportunities to integrate mobile apps into their teaching environments. There remains, however, an emergent need to develop methods and resources to support teachers in their classroom use. This study explores how mobile apps were employed by preservice science teachers in a special teacher education course where they evaluated their affordances for teaching and learning science. Observations of the preservice teachers in a series of fi ve hands-on mobile app activities were analyzed. The teacher educator and preservice teachers’ experiences are synthesized into suggestions on taking advantage of the capabilities of mobile apps for teaching science and on designing mobile apps for educational purposes.