Type to Learn retrospective: When our computer lab became a battle royale

Over the years, details about my middle school’s computer lab became fuzzy. I can’t recall my teacher’s name. I can’t say with certainty who regularly sat near me in the class. I certainly wouldn’t bet my life on remembering the period of the day on which the class took place.

However, one memory keeps these memories anchored — a memory that has been burned into my mind by the heat of competition.

As class was about to begin, I stood outside the laboratory. There was excitement and a buzz about the class. Although it was rare for all students to engage in the same activity simultaneously, everyone was anxious as they waited for their classmates to leave and clear the space.

I remember straining to see the leaderboard — it was barely visible if you looked through the corner of the door’s window to the far wall. The top 10 scorers were written on easel papers and taped together. Use the Type feature to learnIt was there for everyone to see. The mountaintop was where we all longed to be, and it was just before lunch.

Every battle station had a large, chunky IBM-style keyboard and a piece of printer card taped at the top. The sheet of paper was the diabolical anti-cheat mechanism, meant to shield your eyes and so you could learn to trust your instincts and become a true “touch typer” — and to ensure no foul play occurred in this clicky-clacky battle royale. I’m not sure if anyone else remembers the feeling of their quivering fingers finding the little nubs on the “J” and “F” keys, after you lowered the paper over the keys. I remember practicing hitting “shift + /” three times before logging in with my username and password. The question mark in my head was going to keep me away from the top.

If you’ve played Use the Type feature to learnIf you’re a veteran, you know that it is not fair to compare the game with a battle royale. You could describe it as a sprint, endurance, speed and accuracy decathlon. You were pushed to the limits by your slimy fingers.

The challenges could be as simple as a word or a character, to complex writing with addresses and punctuation. You could not go wrong. The game, which played on the competitive nature and skill-building abilities of teens, was brilliant in retrospect. I can’t even imagine playing the game without the added factor of the class ranking system.

A NASA-style countdown greeted the user on their curiously space-themed typing journey. After signing in, you were reminded of proper finger placement and ergonomics: “Fingers curved, wrists flat, feet flat, sit up straight.” These instructions were given by the vaguely human voice which guided you through your subsequent lessons in a hilariously chopped and screwed style. “Practice typing jay-j-j-jay, practice typing eff-eh-eh-eh-eff,” it stammered as you slammed your fingers onto the keys faster than it was prepared to follow along. As you moved, a pair of slightly translucent hands danced about a screen.

As the originalTo learn, typeFor Windows 98 and some online footage, you can see that the developers leaned more into the space theme for subsequent editions. It is difficult to believe that the metaphor has not been fully explained. After you had learned the letters and numbers and were able to use them correctly, your virtual keyboard would disappear and be replaced with a starry sky. The screen will show letters in different spots in an eye and combo typing exercise. Then there was a mode where you would be in deep space, looking out through the window of your implied spacecraft, where the terminal was for some reason demanding you type “aaa” followed by “101.” When you entered these commands correctly, different planets would zoom across your screen, and the level climaxed with the fanfare of lasers. One can only guess what is happening deep in space. Senient spaceship, with an erratic navigation system that is controlled by random sequences of Simon Says alphabets. This is the first time I have ever asked this question.

The class was filled with intense competition. As we passed the tests and got passing grades, our levels increased. We could often progress to multiple levels within a single class on a good day. Sometimes, we were also given stand-alone typing tests that measured our accuracy and speed regardless of how far the game had advanced. Every score was recorded and tracked for bragging points.

Primary bragging rights were won by a simple question: “What level did you get to?” This is what was tracked on the wall, but I also remember running over to my neighbor’s computer during the shorter typing tests that were held at checkpoints throughout the semester. “71, 98,” my neighbor would say smugly as I gazed at his screen. The first was the word per minute while the second represented percentage accuracy. My meagre 60, 100 was a dismal number. I hated making errors. Andy, his elder brother away at college gave me a unique advantage I wanted: A desktop computer which was unsupervised. In addition to my misery at losing, I was also jealous of Andy’s access to an exciting new game. Grand Theft Auto.

It’s a hazy memory that feels like it’s in a fish tank when I try to imagine it; the pure emotion is preserved perfectly, with some of the details fading or obscured. It’s also a classic ’90s memory that for a time felt completely unique to me and my fifth grade class, but now in the age of social media, it is obvious this same experience was had by a slew of other public school students all over the country who were lucky enough to have fully equipped computer labs. That takes some of the magic away, but it doesn’t change the fact that I cracked the top five multiple times during the month that we learned to incorporate the open and closed parenthesis.

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