Earlier this year, Rolling Stone published a feature about Billie Eilish, which was essentially a part of her press tour promoting her album Hit Me Hard And Soft, which only succeeded in making me feel old as hell for the first time in my life. While reaching for a keyboard to show the Rolling Stone interviewer some YouTube videos of animals, Eilish revealed that regrets never learning how to type because she “wasn’t that generation” and that her parents never taught her. Mind you, I’m only five years her senior. Though to be fair, my academic upbringing tried really hard to make typing fun with early aughts gaming relics like JumpStart Typing.
JumpStart Typing, developed by Knowledge Adventure, is an educational arcade-style typing program “made especially for kids” from ages seven to ten that was released in 1997. My private grade school insisted upon using the program in our mandatory computer classes to make us better contributors to civilized society, etc etc. This came in pretty handy for my school considering Jumpstart Typing had CD-ROM programs especially designed to familiarize kids with computers—be they bumbling toddlers or know-it-all fifth graders.
Like most video games, JumpStart Typing weaved a storyline with characters that looked like a cross between Reboot and Cyberchase into its educational romp. It was all more ingenious than my six-year-old brain had the capacity to appreciate. Jumpstart Typing‘s story essentially tasks kids with unearthing their “untapped typing talent” as “keyboard athletes” while competing in the very real and very important keyboarding Olympics. All of this is achieved under the savvy tutelage of Coach QWERTY.
The only problem was that his daughter, Polly Spark, locked Coach Qwerty in an industrially-sealed trophy room in a fit of rage after he kicked her off the team. He apparently didn’t like her specific brand of typing prowess. Women’s wrongs aside, the only way to get Coach Qwerty out is to collect power cards as rewards for competing in a slew of timed typing Olympic games.
Key among JumpStart Typing‘s thinly veiled computer lesson plans were Radical Snowboarding, Ultimate Skateboarding, and my favorite, Rockin’ Rock Climbing. Each game boiled down to quick time event typing games where players would perform cool skateboard tricks, slide down a slope, and climb the side of a mountain while avoiding various obstacles.
Left to its own devices, JumpStart Typing would be a breezy hour-long feat for a kid to complete. The added difficulty came with our teachers’ artificial bloat in completing the game. You see, the actual Olympic games were easy as shit. All they’d ask is for players to hit a varying combination of a single key and a punctuation mark. Half the time, kids would button mash to brute force their way to the top. It certainly didn’t help that we lost our volume privileges with the games after kids started to have a bit too much fun hearing Poly’s voice grunts while lifting weights.
This is why teachers would dangle the games as a carrot on a stick for students who completed the less enthralling—but more applicable training center lessons. These series of lessons would time you on how fast it would take to complete nonsensical sentences like “A cliff snuffs from an official buffet.” Having to “do your dailies” in the form of training center lessons created a competitive arms race in our class to get poor Coach Qwerty from his whimsical imprisonment. An unsanctioned competition made all the more intense considering our class only lasted 30 minutes. We were born to slack off and forced to become typing speed runners.
JumpStart Typing was an unironically cool part of education because it was socially accepted gaming. As opposed to sneaking a quick session of my brother’s GTA Vice City only to beeline to the tank in the Scarface mansion, JumpStart was a school-sanctioned LAN party where kids enter in their names or gamertag-esque monikers. It also bred a similar kind of competitive environment akin to the fighting game arcade scene where kids would peek over at each other’s progress and ask around for hints to beat tough typing challenges.
JumpStart Typing‘s value as a formative experience received critical acclaim from Discovery Education, which lauded it for familiarizing kids with typing—even if its lesson plans were pretty basic. All this to say I had a more illuminating childhood than Billie Eilish with respect to hitting keyboards hard and soft to pull up dopey YouTube videos because I had the power of educational video games on my side.
