When I went to grade school in the late '80s, we were still learning keyboarding on typewriters and Apple IIe's. Then came the PC and the advent of Mavis Beacon. What a great way to learn typing. Not only did the game focus on speed of typing but it made it fun to learn accuracy. For people of my generation who learned on Mavis Beacon the word "GWAM" became normal talk. Your GWAM is your gross words a minute. Mavis would then penalize you for your mistakes to give you a net words per minute rate.
It starts out with easy lessons, teaching you the home keys and how to properly reach over to other keys and special punctuation marks.
Then the game access to more difficult lessons, revolving around accuracy and speed. It was almost like an English lesson learning to type letters and other forms. The game was enhanced with mini goal-oriented games within to help make the software fun for younger people. One game in particular I remember is the one with the race car where the faster and more accurate you typed, the higher your speed was. Mavis Beacon issued newer versions of the game with better games and more fun ways of learning to type.
The advanced lessons can get difficult as Mavis begins to harshly penalize
you for your mistakes. If I remember correctly, there are several reports that can be generated by the program to give you proper feedback on your development and show you the error spots that you are prone to so you can be more aware of what to focus on. The program is simple enough for a pre-schooler to learn on but advanced enough to the point where we were graded based on our performance and progression in the lessons. It is still above and beyond any other program I have come across when it comes to learning a QWERTY keyboard. Sophisticated for a DOS program would be a sufficient description but I prefer to recommend it as an all-around great program. In the days of RPG and Simulation games, great educational software like Mavis Beacon and Number Munchers is lost in cyberspace.
