Andy Huang Home Page

History

KP Typing Tutor was originally written for kids. When I taught a computing class for beginners in 1993, I found many students got trapped in  multi-level menus of a typing tutor in use, and the functions of the tutor were too complicated and lack of flexibility both for adults and children. Learners quickly became frustrated using the typing tutor so I decided to write a typing tutor that was easy to use and had all essential functions of Computer Aided Teaching.

* March, 1993. KP Typing Tutor for DOS was developed using Turbo Pascal v5.5.

* May, 1995. After studying about 20 typing tutors, KP Typing Tutor 2.0 for DOS was the result of total redevelopment using Borland C++. The reason of choosing BC++ was that at that time there was not Turbo Pascal but BC++ in the network of University of Newcastle upon Tyne where I studied.

* August, 1995. I wrote an article about typing courses, and developed KP Typing Course Generator using C++.  With this generator I was able to produce quality typing courses.  In fact anybody could since then generate quality typing courses in any alphabetic language for any specific culture.

* October, 1996. KP Typing Tutor 4.11, the final DOS version.

* October, 1998. KP Typing Tutor for Win95 v1.0 was released. The programming tool was Delphi.

* October, 2000, KP Typing Tutor for Win95/NT v3.0. Multi-user supported.

* October, 2002, KP Typing Tutor v4.0. Full supports for European accents.

* November, 2002, KP Typing Tutor Net Edition v1.0 (Client/Server)　

Some basic thoughts for developing KP Typing Tutor

1. I learned to type with an old fashion mechanical typewriter within 9 hours over a three day period. I think most people will learn to type in 10 hours with the help of a typing tutor. Typing tutor are a temporary learning aid, and the learner will continue to develop skills through practical efforts after mastering the basic skill of typing. So the learner may throw away the typing tutor after the initial 15 hours of guided practice.

2. As many learners may not be familiar computer software, the user interfaces of the typing tutor should be as much simple as possible. Never let the learners get trapped in levels of menus and wizards.

3. Fancy interfaces may be more attractive, especially to kids. However, following common DOS or Windows interface styles is a better choice to assist learners become more familiar with the general graphical interfaces of Windows.

4. Unlike other typing tutors with strong monitoring and guiding functions on the learner's progress, KP deliberately employs weak monitoring and guiding. It is difficult for a strong monitoring and guiding scheme to intelligently adapt learners of different ages and different background in different situations. Furthermore, since learning is mostly a self motivated process, strong monitoring and guidance can result in  many self motivated people feeling uncomfortable.

5. The content of courses should be adjustable for learners of different backgrounds. The contents of the program should cover the needs of most people and I encourage teachers, language centers and even religion groups to modify the contents of the courses.

6. The layouts of the on-screen keyboards are adjustable to meet the requirements of a range of learners, including single-handed  and weak-sighted people. The program should also easily support alphabetic languages other than English.

7. To avoid copyright problem, I developed  typing courses of my own through the development of the Typing Course Generator.

With such a flexible program  it was easy to add supports for Dvorak keyboards once I'd learnt about them.