If you’re looking for a free typing test, easy techniques to learn keyboarding skills, or just a few fun typing games to help keep your fingers nimble, then you’ll want to visit the website Sense-Lang.org. Anyone can join in the fun, and the competitions sponsored by the website open up typing challenges to schools and students around the world. We asked the development team at Sense-Lang.org to describe the competitions and to talk about some of their favorite games.

Typesy: On February 10, 2014, your next typing challenge starts. How can people get signed up to participate in the Typing Race?

SL: The competition is intended for classes. We’ve provided teachers with a virtual school environment. This environment allows to create classes, manage students, generate assignments, lessons and tests and view their progress. Our concept is that games can efficiently motivate the learning process and the teachers feedback support it.

The “Typing Race” is an excellent example for a game which inspire students to practice. Therefore, we’ve created the World Typing Championship for Classes. Teachers can register classes in the competition from their dashboard and enjoy cool statistics to share at the class/student level.

Typesy: The games you provide let people practice a wide range of keyboarding skills, from letter placement to whole-word typing and even sentence construction. Teens and adults will have a lot of fun with them, but there’s no game on the site right now for younger kids. Since children as young as three years old are learning to use computers these days, will you be developing games that are designed for the 3-to-6-year-old age group?

SL: Although we’re constantly looking for new ideas, markets and visions, the goal of the website is to share the touch typing technique with the world and the main focus is aimed for school ages. Sense-lang already targeted senior audience (Skillfulsenior.com) and it is very likely that pre-school ages will be approached as well at some point.

Typesy: Users can select tutorials based on the common QWERTY keyboard layout or the less-common but still popular Dvorak layout. What is the Colemak keyboard, which is also an available option?

SL: Indeed, Colemak is less common than QWERTY and DVORAK. The Colemak structure is relatively similar to QWERTY but offers convenient capabilities such as a heavier use of home (middle) row and minimized finger path distance.

Typesy: How can a teacher use the Sense-Lang.org website in their classroom?

SL: Sometimes, one link is better than thousand words. Our manual contains all the available features and characteristics of the virtual school environment – click here to find out more: http://www.sense-lang.org/teachers/instruction.pdf

Typesy: Although more and more people are using social media, it’s still often hard for older people who never learned to type to make the most of the internet. What suggestions do you have for people who aren’t comfortable using a computer, much less the keyboard?

SL: As mentioned previously, Skillfulsenior.com (one of our brands) offers to teach computers basics for seniors or inexperienced users. Our brand – PieceOfCake – contains a large variety of educational websites: poenglishcake.com (learning English), spanishuno.com (learning Spanish), pomindcake.com (mind challenges) are currently on line, and more are still to come.