Mar 13, 2012

Keyboard Training, A Playful Typing Tutor


Improving your typing speed and accuracy can really speed up your day to day computer activities. Instead of using the one-finger method to hover like a hawk over the keyboard, you could improve your performance with the help of typingtutors. These programs help you improve your typing speed and accuracy. Depending on the program, they show you how to place your hands over the keyboard and which finger is linked to which key on the keyboard.
Excellent programs for this task are the Online Typing Tutor which visualizes this nicely, or the desktop apps Rapidtyping or Bruce’s Unusual Typing Wizard.
Keyboard Training is a lightweight typing software for the Windows operating system that’s packs the training into a little game. When you start the portable program you are presented with a minimalistic keyboard (azerty layout by default, option to change to qwerty in the options).
keyboard training
A click on keyboard training > new game starts the game. Your only task is to hit the highlighted letter before the time runs out. Whenever you hit the correct letter, you increase your overall score. When you miss or when the time runs out, it is game over. The game is set to easy difficulty by default, which gives you 20 seconds to hit the right key on the keyboard. Three additional difficulty levels are available which reduce the available time to hit the correct key on the virtual keyboard.
The biggest issues with this approach is that the program does not support a full keyboard, and that you do not learn how to position your hands to type on the keyboard. The one-finger method works as fine as the ten-finger method, at least for the easier difficulty levels.
If you are serious about learning to type, I suggest you take a look at some of the alternatives listed above. If you prefer a minimalistic playful experience, you might want to download and try out Keyboard Training instead.via[ghacks]

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