I am still working away on the touch typing. My drills have taken a hit recently as some of my projects have ramped up quite a bit. It was ever thus…

I'm also getting pretty frustrated with learn2type. They have 6 levels of typing skill and you are supposed to progress through the levels by gaining better accuracy and speed. However I have been stuck at level 3 for a long time now. This level is quite a big jump from the first two. My performance has been stuck at around 75%. Learn2Type has this performance measure that applies to each practice run — I don't know how they calculate it. Anyway, I just don't seem to be able to break through the barrier.

Obviously, I just have to keep at it until it "clicks". But I do think that the design of the system is incorrect. Level progression is an important reward strategy for skill building. All good computer game concepts have level-progression very carefully fine-tuned, so that the player gets constant positive encouragment. The same thing applies in this case. Except that learn2type have got it wrong. Instead of 6 levels there should be 60. That way you can keep moving up levels all the time. That's how you generate "addiction". Right now, learn2type has turned into a chore.

The other niggly thing about learn2type is that the font used to display the text you have to type in is a very bad font. It's hard to tell the difference between 1 (one) and l (el). Or 0 (zero) and O (Oh). Now this is just silly. Not choosing a good monospace font for typing lessons is a pretty major blunder. Not sure how they let this one get through. It's not a show-stopper, but it is annoying.

Anyway, onwards…