The Week in iOS Apps: A good investment?

This week’s roundup of new and updated iOS apps includes an app that “invests your loose change” into a diversified portfolio. Plus: apps for gamers, art fans, sports lovers and more.

This is an unusual investing app: Acorns is free for iPhone; you connect your credit or debit card account to the app and, anytime you make a purchase, it invests your “loose change” into a diversified porfolio. (Buy lunch, for example, for $12.50, and the app will round that amount up to $13—using the 50-cent difference for the investment.) You can also choose to directly invest funds in amounts of your choosing. Acorns charges $1 a month, plus annual management fees, once you’ve started investing. Will microinvesting yield big returns? Only time will tell.

This free iPhone app takes the popular “Ask Me Anything” threads on Reddit—where readers ask questions of “everyone from movie stars to astronauts to artists”—and turns them into into attractive magazine-style Q&As. It’s a fun way to pass the time, especially since the app helps you bypass the cluttered Reddit threads in favor of a cleaner, easy-to-read layout.

Cookie Monster’s Challenge is a $3 iPad game for kids ages 3-5 in which they can play 10 mini-games that help them practice self-control, focus, memory, following directions, and problem-solving. Sound like homework? Don’t worry: For your kids, it’ll be lots of fun. Also: COOKIES! Nomnomnomnomnom.

Google’s answer to PowerPoint is  now available as an iOS app: You can create and edit presentations in the app, work on them offline, or collaborate with colleagues to perfect your efforts. (You can also open and edit PowerPoint files in the app.) And when you’re done? Make your presentation right from the app.

This $1 scanning app for iOS updated this week with a number of new features: It can now auto-export your scanned docs straight to Dropbox or PDFPen Scan’s iCloud storage; it remembers the last folder used for importing or exporting a file; and it can now export multiple pages or multiple documents at once.

This is the official app of one of the most amazing museums of art in the entire world. It offers listings of current events and exhibitions at the museum; the ability to purchase membership, admission, or tickets to museum events; and it includes recommendations for off-beat and family-friendly artworks.

What if you could redesign your favorite sports magazine so that it featured only your favorite teams? SportsManias, a free app for iPhone and iPad, is kind of like that. Recent changes let users share stories more easily via Twitter and Facebook, watch videos in the device’s landscape mode, and more prominently features your favorite teams in the daily scoreboard roundup of game results.

Red Clock is now free … Plane Finder now lets you watch all your previous flights going back to 2010 … and Vimeo (pictured) has made it much easier to upload videos directly from your camera roll.