(4/19) Recap 2021 - Digital Natives

I learned how to use a computer as an adult, and it was hard. On my first job out of college, I was so nervous typing in front of my boss that I would visibly tremble. It took me six months of practicing at night on Ratatype before I was confident at work.

My experience has greatly influenced the way we teach at TechLit. Over the last few years, we’ve introduced computers to students of all ages: adults and kids. We have the seen the keyboard as the biggest barrier to confidence for our students, too.

So this March when I had six weeks with the neighborhood kids, I introduced them to our touch-typing application, qwerty. At first the kids would get bored of the class quickly. But after augmenting qwerty with a leaderboard, levels and badges, they were motivated and competing just like any other computer game. Later this year, we rolled out qwerty to all our 10 schools.

It warms my heart seeing thousands of kids being confident at the keyboard.