Typing: No Longer Just for the Big Kids

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Meg McCaffrey -- School Library Journal, 10/01/2003

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Tired of seeing young kids pecking slowly at their keyboards? It might be time to recruit Bernie, an animated mouse created by South-Western, a leading provider of business education materials. Bernie stars in a new software program, Bernie's Typing Travels (www.berniestypingtravels.com), aimed at equipping students in grades three to five with basic keyboarding skills.

The interactive software package was developed in response to elementary school teachers' requests for a keyboarding training tool.

Enter Bernie. After the inquisitive rodent disrupts a lab session conducted by Professor Keys, a bespectacled duck, the professor's experiments are inadvertently sent back in time. Students, using a graphics-packed word processor, are required to help Bernie recover the lost experiments by completing keyboarding lessons. The lessons, in turn, have kids crash the Boston Tea Party and compete in the Greek Olym-pics. A successful score rewards kids with a computer game, such as one that sends students back to 1969, and asks them to land a lunar module.

The software program can be installed via CD-ROM or loaded onto a network or a hard drive. A site license costs $755 for unlimited use. There's also an individual user version for $39.