Typonaut
Learn touch typing on a journey through space. Comets with words fly towards your spaceship. Type them before they arrive. Every chapter adds new keys, from the home row to the whole keyboard. For children from grade 3 and anyone who wants to learn to type properly. You need a keyboard.
Choose
- German (German keyboard, QWERTZ) Twelve chapters with German words, from the home row to ä, ü, ö and ß.
- English (English keyboard, QWERTY) Twelve chapters with English words, from the home row to the apostrophe.
How it works
- Choose a course: German with a German keyboard or English with an English keyboard.
- Put your fingers on the home row: left a s d f, right j k l and the semicolon. You can feel small bumps on f and j.
- The first letter picks the comet. Type the whole word and it turns into stardust.
- A wrong letter and a comet that arrives cost energy from the shield. When it is empty, you try the level again.
- Do not look at the keyboard. Type slowly and carefully, speed will come by itself.
What you learn
- I can put my fingers in the home position and type the home row without looking.
- I can type capital letters with the Shift key of the other hand.
- I can type every key of the letter rows with the right finger.
- I can type punctuation and special characters with the right finger.
- I can copy words with few mistakes and notice which keys are still hard for me.
Why touch typing?
Typing with all ten fingers without looking at the keyboard is faster and makes fewer mistakes. Every finger has its keys and returns to the home row after every keystroke. At the start, accuracy matters most; speed comes with practice. Short sessions on several days help more than one long hour.
Sources
The order of the keys follows school practice, for example the Leitfaden Tastaturschreiben of the canton of Schwyz (2024, in German). The words were written by the app's creator with the help of an AI assistant, not taken from word lists of others. Which finger types which key of the German keyboard is listed in the Wikipedia article Zehnfingersystem (in German, licence CC BY-SA 4.0). For the English keyboard the usual assignment applies, with the home row a s d f and j k l ;, see Touch typing (CC BY-SA 4.0). The fingers for z, ', ? and - follow the common charts and are not listed there one by one.