I'd like to announce a new KTouch version (so far the last in the KDE 3.5 series) available on the sourceforge page: http://ktouch.sourceforge.net
I won't be able to contribute much until summer, but if you find the time to download and try it out, I would like to collect some opinions and suggestions regarding:
- what should be improved to make it better usable for children
- what features are missing (see list below for planned features)
- compared to other touch typing programs, what are the shortcomings of KTouch?
- what do you think about the lectures? How could they be improved?
- KTouch typing games: what kind of games can you think of (I had a few suggestions already, see below)
- better keyboard drawing engine to support different keyboard layouts/character sets, also more keys can be printed on each key
- progressive build-up of the keyboard: only the keys that are known in the current level are drawn colored, others are still grey (thus helping kids to focus on the keys they should know so far)
- games:
- balloon game: balloons with character draw on them fly up, press the correct key and ***bang***
- block game: single colored blocks with characters fall down the screen in a grid, pressing keys with the characters makes blocks disappear, press them in a correct order to align 4 blocks of the same color to get extra points
- tests: for school kids and teachers, you can setup a test by defining the text to type (lecture and levels), and an optional time limit
- during the test you cannot change settings like auto-level-advance or manual-level advance or anything else (to avoid cheating and give teachers the means to evaluate kids).
Andreas