The University of Liverpool

An extract from the evaluation report of the University of Liverpool.

The evidence we have from what has already been written about the development of keyboard skills indicates that this is an area of learning that has been neglected in work with children. There is a growing perception amongst the education community that there is a need to pay particular attention to the development of keyboard skills with children in the Primary Years.

The Keyboard Crazy game has clear relevance to the National Curriculum in Information Technology and it can be fitted productively into the Literacy Hour in the Primary School.

The game is flexible enough to be used in normal classroom situations. During trials it was played in one school in a physical environment where there was a consistently high level of distraction. It is a testament to the power of the game to absorb the children that the many sources of distraction were ignored. The structure of the game is sufficiently simple and manageable for children to organise their own play with minimal supervision from the teacher.

The game can be played productively by some children in Year 1 through to children in Year 6. The children themselves and members of staff indicate that the game is highly motivating, and boys and girls are equally enthusiastic when they play the game. We have both oral and documentary evidence of teachers' recognition of the educational value of the game and that children enjoy playing it.

It is clear that children gain more from Keyboard Crazy than merely learning keyboard skills. There are many things learned when children play the game from simple learning to more complex developments. Some of these are:

• Symbol identification
• Eye/hand coordination in manipulating the letter keys
• Symbol/sound association
• Symbol positioning
• Conformity to a rule-bound game
• Turn Taking
• Self-monitoring of own performance and monitoring of the performance of others
• Cooperation and negotiating skills

It has been concluded that there is a pressing need for this game, that all primary children in the age range 5 - 11 can benefit from this game, and that the evidence collected from statistical analysis was consistent with that produced by the teachers who assessed it, i.e. that playing the game a number of times resulted in:

• Higher speed of information-processing of the keyboard symbols.
• Greater accuracy in the identification of the positions of the symbols of the keyboard.
• Children were thus enabled to become more efficient, and hence more confident in their management of the computer keyboard.

The full evaluation report is available on request.