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The speed drills are exactly that. If you are teaching kids typing, or just having your kids learn it themselves, this is a great typing program. This is also a fun program for adults. If you can't type quickly enough, you cannot get through the speed drills. It's lots of fun, so it keeps kids motivated. My only complaint about this program is that it doesn't give enough practice where kids who type slowly can still keep up.
Not enough variety of activities to hold a child's interest. A very basic program.
This would be a great additions for the software creators to think about adding in the "next" version. Disappointed, though, that it did not go to the next level of providing opportunities for words, sentences, and paragraph practices. Great practice for learning letter positions on keyboard. Challenging and fun activities for practices.
However, despite these "shortcomings" this is one of the better typing programs in respect to achieving results. Yep I wish it would do provide other features i.e. a network version of the product so that I can review progress charts from a single view. Read an earlier review which slammed this product. The kids love it and any program that gets students excited and involved is half-way there. I use it from 2nd Grade to 6th Grade. Found my students to achieve decent proficiency in typing. So what if it shows a canned movie.
The sidewalk event requires both speed and accuracy and is definitely a challenge. For kids just learning to type it makes a very boring (remember high school typing class, before computers, for those readers over 30)really a lot of fun.Teenaged kids who watch too much TV and play ultra action type video games will also find this pretty mundane. I bought this as a gift for my six year old who wanted to learn to type on the computer, tried other products at the library and the librarian recommended this one. It runs better than most kids software. (Though I could see how using it would improve my skills). The graphics are very interactive, if you mistype the characters (called bladers) perform comparable to your performance. You jump more cows and do more flips over them if you are more accurate in that event.
Particularly if you can already type. The graphics are redundent but it motivates the heck out of my six year old.If you are older and too computer savvy you may not like this.
The GREAT thing about this program is that my six year old loves it and it is teaching him good typing skills. One mistake and he runs into an obstacle and flys to fall flat on his face.
I installed this easily on an old pentium 166 running Windows 98. The skater skates along as words are displayed for your to type.
But they really should learn good typing skills anyway and this would help them. It does have some issues with typing too fast or too slow but frankly I think it helps you place your fingers cleanly and accurately.
The different events, cones, cow jumping (a real hoot), half pipe, sidewalk and speed skating concentrate on different typing skills.
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