Making them THINK? Can you Imagine?
March 5, 2008 by Kate Olson
My 6th grade keyboarding students get so frustrated with me when I introduce this activity because it actually makes them THINK, which is usually unheard of in traditional keyboarding practice 
I don’t need to go into the research about keyboarding skills being developed best through drill and practice, consistent time on the keyboard, and all of that, right? Most of my readers aren’t big fans of keyboarding-speak This is just one of the many instances of the 6th grade masses grumbling that they don’t GET it and it’s so STUPID - amazingly enough, after 5 minutes of the activity, the students were turning it into a competition and shouting across the room about how many answers they got correct - imagine that, sometimes learning is fun!
Anyway, back to the activity. In keyboarding/touch-typing, everything is based around the concept of a home row where your fingers always return to certain keys - this enables you to type without looking at your hands because of muscle memory - the skills are developed through practice, practice, practice. At the beginnning of the year I created this extremely basic “quiz” activity in which students have to correctly identify which home row finger reaches to a given key. The instructions aren’t the easiest, but once the kids understand, they zip right through. Some examples:
Question: Y
Answer: J
Explanation: Your right index finger reaches up from the J to the Y
The answers are all one of the home row keys: A S D F J K L ; and if the question is a home row key, so is the answer.
Example:
Question: A
Answer: A
Does this make ANY sense to you? Take a minute and check out the quiz and try a few rounds, it really does challenge your keyboarding skills and memory - it’s so tempting to just automatically type the question letter instead of the home-row key that types it. Thoughts?
Note: BuildQuiz is just a site I came across months ago and built this quiz on, I don’t actually recommend it as a great quizbuilder, but it served the purpose of this activity
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I think that this is a great way to get students thinking about what they are typing and using the correct fingers. I interview people all the time and there are so many people that are not able to type using the proper fingers and are pecking at the keys which is so slow. Good job
I like the quiz. The only thing I wish is that it didn’t throw the occasional:
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I wouldn’t mind trying it with my fourth graders who have mastered all 12 stages of Dance Mat Typing.
How easy/hard was it to create?
Thanks as always for sharing.
Cool tool! I’ll add it to my resources.