Computer Applications Activity: Keyboarding Basketball
Activity Description
A Student Takes a Shot During Typing Basketball
For junior high and elementary school students, learning to touch type can be a tedious process. Proficient typing requires practice, just like any skill. And practice in this case involves a lot of simple, repetitive motions.
To break the monotony of typing out “www sss xxx ooo lll …” over and over, I like to incorporate Keyboarding Basketball, a simple game that gets the students out of their seats during timed typing exercises. The basic premise of the game is to have students shoot a basket after completing a timed typing exercise. Where the students shoot from depends on their typing performance.
All you need for the activity is a Nerf basketball goal and a typing program that will allow you to conduct timed typing tests (if your school does not have access to a typing program, http://www.freetypinggame.net has a lot of different typing lessons and activities).
After setting up the Nerf goal on a closet or door, tape off five different lines for the shooters. Each individual shooting area is labeled with a point value and a word per minute limit, with the lines closest to the goal worth the most points (I know this sounds backwards, but bare with me). The court layout would look something like you see below.
| NERF GOAL |
| 5 Points: 50 + Words Per Minute |
| 4 Points: 40 – 49 Words Per Minute |
| 3 Points: 30 – 39 Words Per Minute |
| 2 Points: 20 – 29 Words Per Minute |
| 1 Point: 0 – 19 Words Per Minute |
The words per minute can be tweaked to match your students’ abilities, but the idea is to reward the best typers by giving them an opportunity to score the most points in the game.
Since basketball is played in quarters, my games consisted of four typing
Typing Basketball Champions, Circa 2005
tests and four rounds of shooting. If you keep things moving, you should be able to get through one game in half an hour.
Aside from being fun for the class, this activity is very effective when played as a series. I divided my class into two teams, and we played each Friday during our typing unit. In order to keep the students busy while their classmates were shooting, I had them open Excel and keep track of their words per minute and points scored. At the end of the term, the students learned how to use formulas like Average, Max and Min, which provided a great introduction to spreadsheets.
Lesson Resources
http://www.freetypinggame.net/play.asp
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