The art of typing is an extensive aspect of importance that plays a sweeping role in most fields. Typing is a vital essence of writing that plays a major bit in the buildup of the momentum of the write-up. A good writer depends not only on their creativity or impeccable writing style and feels on the need to maintain a constant writing speed to complete their topics.
As beginners who plan to improve their writing or work on their aspects of building up their content, they must work on the rate at which they describe their ideas and convey their messages through their article, blog, or any piece of write-up.
Such can be the case for people who have learning disabilities, like dyslexia too! When such individuals are allowed to use the keyboard, they show significant improvements. Moreover, students with learning disabilities can be fast typers; but, they would need a much longer practice time as comprehending and retaining which letter is where takes time. For this, constant exercise and implementation is required!
But how do you do it in a fun way that engages students and individuals with dyslexia? This is where typing games can come into use. In this post, we will talk about the various benefits of improved typing and tell you about the various online games to help you improve your typing speed.
Why to improve typing skills?
Typing knowledge is very needful in each position of everyday life, even if a student wants to complete their essay writing online for any school project, or maybe a corporate professional who needs to complete their work sample within a fixed deadline. It is also essential for a journalist, typist, account management, etc. The management of typing is vital, and it plays an extensive part in everyday life applications.
Improving typing has been a major fragment of skill development required in each aspect of productivity. The other association and applications of digital platforms like the introduction of online typing games and activities have also significantly contributed to the development of touch-typing and e-typing skills.
- Speed
Speed is one of the first and most explicit benefits of learning the touch typing form. A touch typist can easily master typing speeds above 75-80 words per minute, while a non-trained typist has a typing speed of around ten. Typing speed increases an expert typist’s typing ability without looking for keyboard keys. The speed improvement makes the user more efficient and increases their work focus.
- Accuracy
One of the most crucial things for a typist is to master learning words, phrases, or sentences very accurately. Improved accuracy improves workplace confidence, as the users and their colleagues trust their document production by realizing that the written content is spelled properly and grammatically accurate.
- Time
If the user improves typing speed, for example, from 30 words/min to 60, the user effectively reduces the time needed to execute the same task. An average two-finger typist, who types at the speed of 10 words/min, would take about 15-17 minutes to complete a 170-word article. A touch typist, on the contrary, can perform the same task in 5-6 mins. It has been determined that a trained touch typist could save much of their working time using a computer by improving this skill.
- Decrease Fatigue
Typing leads to psychologically and physically exhausting of the user when performed for long periods. Upgrading to touch type effectively reduces mental and physical tiredness. Mentally, it prevents the user from focusing on two things instantly. Thus the user has to think about their output, not the individual keys. Physically, it keeps the user away from constantly letting him look down and seek your next combination of keypad hits.
- Health
Overall, touch typing proves better for maintaining health. You don’t need to crook overlooking the keys, and enhanced use of all of your fingers decreases the condition of repetitive stress injuries (RSI).
- Productivity
By upgrading to touch typing, the user shall provide more productive working conditions and even increase his/her and the organization’s confidence. Time becomes essentially halved and may find errors to occur nearly absent. Thus honing a skill like touch typing is a matter of good productive strength and is desired in most organizations.
List of typing games to play online
Games and online activities have always proved to be a source of learning and skill enhancement for different growth fields and increasing productivity. They not only are helpful for amateurs, beginners, or young learners rather have been quite useful also for experts and masters for replenishing various skills and topics in any point of requirement.
Beginners and amateurs, on the contrary, have found these helpful games and online platforms to improve their skills on the next level. Similarly, many typists have found these games quite useful for honing their typing skills and mastering them efficiently.
1. Typing Attack
Typing Attack is a learning-based game that lets players learn to type words quickly. The user’s mission is to survive an attack based in space. Approaching enemy vessels are identified as words, and the player must type those words quickly to destroy the vessels before it destroys their ship. The game provides the user with Higher challenges, thus allowing the player to choose a learning pace according to their wish or change the difficulty level to a more high-intensity laser-blasting combat system.
The moving ships and blasting action distract the player as the game progresses. Remaining calm and noticing easy words associated with the specific ships might be considered the best strategy, rather than unnecessarily attempting to determine which ship might be closing in faster. If you are teletyping the right letters but can’t stop destroying the ship, look out for progress on other ships.
Once the user starts with a word, he must finish blasting one ship before moving on to the next target. The player must stay focused on words and look out for accuracy too. At the end, the game shows the players typing speed, accuracy, and total score with an option to restart the game.
2. Type Rush
Type rush is another straight and fascinating learning-based typing game that may attract lots of users and players throughout. Type rush is a sports racing game that comes in two different forms; street race and boat race. These in-game campaign systems provide high intensity and adrenaline rush to the players playing them.
The game offers a full catalog of features accessible to the players in a comprehensive platform of gaming. The game involves a couple of sentences or a small paragraph that the player has to type while representing a boat or a streetcar in a race. The player competes online with other players by typing the fragment of the paragraph word by word, even maintaining the uppercase and punctuations of the given sentence.
The faster the player types while also keeping in mind the accuracy of the letters and punctuations, the player’s car or boat travels according to their typing speed and accuracy. The race ends when the sentence or phrase is completed, the game then provides the rank of the player’s vehicle and data of Accuracy and typing speed. The game is very helpful for beginners as it helps them master aspects of time management, the accuracy of teletyping, and the speed of words per minute.
3. KeyTower
Keytower is a build-up goal-based game to improve the user’s typing. Keytower is based on the stacking principle of boxes and tests players’ typing ability to stack boxes represented by letters on top of each other. The game also improves the focus and concentration of typists as they need to calmly wait for the right time to hit the letter so that the stack perfectly lines up.
KeyTower also tests the player’s reflexes as they must remember where they placed the previous box since the user needs to continue stacking a new pile of boxes with new letters but above the same location of the earlier placed box.
It improves the player’s accuracy and improves strategy building for typing. This high-intensity game is enough to keep the user engaging throughout. By the time you finish erecting your skyscraper, the skill of typing whole sentences with your eyes closed may feel like a matter of time to the player. It was initially created for kids below twelve years of age but is known for providing crazy fun throughout all age groups.
4. Dance Mat Typing
Dance Mat helps beginners, especially kids, memorize all the letters on the keyboard. Little typists become well-known with the “home row” positioned keys (A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L). Progressing with the help of some in-game animal companions, typists then move on to the second and third steps, where they become well aware of the position of keys present above and below the home row keys.
In the final level, Claudette the Cat, an interesting in-game character, shows the player how to use the letters X and Z and type capital letters with the help of the “shift” key, also making them well aware of the key types like the apostrophe, slash, and space. This game will also make kids and beginners memorize the proper positioning of the hands-on keyboard—a good skill honed to learn young before they grab any improper typing habits.
5. Keyboard Ninja
Keyboard Ninja is a classical fruit ninja-based typing game that tests the player’s abilities of time management, quick responses, and reflexes. The game is a perfect training game for beginners and kids to improve and master their typing speed and accuracy.
It initially allows the player to select the type of letters they want to practice, such as a home row, top row, bottom row, all letters, and even allows them to practice typing numbers using the Numpad.
After selecting the preferred choice, letters or numbers pop up on the game screen with fruits, and players have to hit the correct popped-up character at the right time. There are also tricky popups like letters associated with bombs that end the game when hit.
Players will see the scoreboard at the end, depicting their time taken, fruits sliced, and points scored for every positive hit and points will also be deducted for wrong hits.
6. Alpha Munchies/Typing Rocket
Alpha Munchies is a game influenced by Atari’s Space Invaders. The point of the game is to shoot the little miniature aliens before they can hit the blocks, in this way protecting yourself and your utilities (in this condition, your food).
But in this modified version, the player shoots the pixel aliens by hitting specific letters that appear along with each alien. Alpha Munchies is well suitable for elementary-age learners attempting to memorize the alphabet.
Still, it also feels wonderful for older kids aiming to speed up their typing. The player can also choose their desired difficulty level and enjoy the learning-based game.
7. Type- a- ballon
Type-a-ballon is a shooting-based typing game where players improve their typing speed and accuracy creatively and interactively. The game provides the players with three difficulty levels to choose from according to their needs. The game also has lesson types in separate keyboard divisions: the home row, top row, Numpad digit typing, etc.
After selecting their lesson type, the players have to hit the appropriate letters associated with the balloons popping up from the ground. They need to press the keys fast to score points as they are provided with only five ballon lives, which will end the game when finished. These lives get finished as the players miss pressing the letters. The balloons get shot up by an arrow released after the players press the required letters.
8. Ollie Street Typing
Ollie Street Typing is a fun game where the main character, Ollie, is on the skateboard and the main objective that Ollie has is of typing the words shown on the screen to collect coins. In simpler words, Ollie keeps on riding the skateboard, and the player has to type the words as fast as possible so that they vanish as soon as you type. But the catch here is that it needs to be done before Ollie on her skateboard reaches the word.
This game encourages students to find random letters on the screen as fast as possible. Moreover, it is also an engaging game as even if one letter is typed wrong, the entire word needs to be typed again. Therefore, it focuses on fast and accurate typing!
Conclusion
Typing is one of the essential components of various forms of writing. A person with good typing skills can maximize their work productivity and perform smart work by completing many tasks within less time. This trait greatly benefits both the skill owner and the people working around with the person.
With the development of e-learning based typing platforms, like online typing games and other interactive activities, the opportunities to improve the rate of words per minute and typing accuracy have been greatly encouraged. With the digitalization of opportunities and skills available at the doorstep of every individual, the transformation of a beginner into an expert or master typer may just be a matter of a few minutes.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,