We are continuously on a mission to make kids love typing, and that journey has recently taken us into real classrooms, listening and watching teachers and kids while they were practicing to use keyboards.
Start With One Finger
While in the classrooms, we immediately noticed that kids’ shorter fingers, developing motor skills, and narrow eye-span made it hard for them to use multiple fingers for typing. We realized that it would be much easier first to take on the keyboard with just one finger.
Map the Keyboard
During our observations, it also became clear that young kids see the keyboard differently from adults. To them, the keyboard is letters and characters in a random order, with no real logic to it. We came up with a unique TypeTastic keyboard visualization that splits all the letters together into nine, color-coded groups. It also doubles as a game board in many of our games. This enables the kids to see the keyboard like a map, and it will be much easier and more fun to find their way around.
Make It Fun!
Another observation was that whenever the students got to practice typing by playing a game, their motivation shot through the roof. Even the kids sitting next to them were curious to see what was going on. So to maximize motivation and accelerate learning, gaming was an obvious way to go.
Welcome TypeTastic!
These observations were taken to our game developers. The inspiring ideas taken from the classrooms became TypeTastic typing games, which you may recognize from Typing Quest Lab. And now these new innovative games are available inside Typing Quest as well! This is the first step of combining typing games as part of Typing Quest course curriculum and for the time being TypeTastic games are in Beta mode and as such they do not save any results or progress. TypeTastic games can be enabled and disabled on a group level just like any other course.
After playing these games the kids will already know their way around the keyboard, and it is super easy to take the rest of the fingers along with our Keyboarding Kickstart course. Talk about a win-win situation!
You must be interested in finding out more about the pedagogy behind the games and you won’t need to look further – it’s all explained in our blog article!
We’re so excited in having TypeTastic games in Typing Quest. This is a whole new chapter in our product development and we’d love to hear what you think about the new games. We’re always open for suggestions and promise to listen and improve according to user feedback.
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