What our customer's say!"typing program", A very basic program. Not enough variety of activities to hold a child's interest.
"good choice", Great practice for learning letter positions on keyboard. Challenging and fun activities for practices. Disappointed, though, that it did not go to the next level of providing opportunities for words, sentences, and paragraph practices. This would be a great additions for the software creators to think about adding in the "next" version.
"Excellent", Read an earlier review which slammed this product. Found my students to achieve decent proficiency in typing. I use it from 2nd Grade to 6th Grade. So what if it shows a canned movie. 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. However, despite these "shortcomings" this is one of the better typing programs in respect to achieving results. The kids love it and any program that gets students excited and involved is half-way there.
"Can teach a 6 year old to type!!!", 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. I installed this easily on an old pentium 166 running Windows 98. It runs better than most kids software. 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 GREAT thing about this program is that my six year old loves it and it is teaching him good typing skills. The graphics are very interactive, if you mistype the characters (called bladers) perform comparable to your performance. The different events, cones, cow jumping (a real hoot), half pipe, sidewalk and speed skating concentrate on different typing skills. You jump more cows and do more flips over them if you are more accurate in that event. The sidewalk event requires both speed and accuracy and is definitely a challenge. The skater skates along as words are displayed for your to type. One mistake and he runs into an obstacle and flys to fall flat on his face. 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. Particularly if you can already type. (Though I could see how using it would improve my skills). 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. But they really should learn good typing skills anyway and this would help them.
"Non-functional, out-of-date software", Marketing gives the impression that this is a 3D interactive, when in fact it is not. After the interactions occur, and sometimes during, you are shown a canned quicktime movie. Same movie may be shown over and over and over...
Any program that requires Windows users to back off of Quicktime 6 and install 2.5 from the CD-ROM is useless.
Tried it on our Mac also and found that if you type too fast, it misses your keystrokes, and counts the stroke as an error! If you type too soon, even after the visual prompt is displayed, it misses the keystroke.
Distracting visuals and too great a visual reliance on the keyboard chart at the expense of the source text hinders learning. IF you make a single mistake, you lose and have to start over.
This program may have functioned well in its day (though I don't see how that could be), but it is out-of-date, in addition to being very poorly designed.
STAY AWAY!!!
