• Online games may help increase typing speed.woman hands typing on laptop keyboard image by .shock from Fotolia.com
  
  A good typing speed is about 30 to 40 words per minute, according to Jenny Kinniff from the Staff Learning and Development department at the University of Maryland. Kids, just like adults, must practice and work themselves up to this rate. Since most interactive typing games focus on increasing typing speed, they are a useful way of helping kids type faster.
  
  

Desert Typing Racer

• This free online typing game from FreeTypingGame.net also doubles as a racing game. In this game, you are driving a car down a road through the desert. Randomly, letters will appear in the air and you must type that same letter on the keyboard before the letter passes. Occasionally, there will be cars directly in front of the car that you are driving. When this happens, you use the space bar to jump over those cars. The 40 levels in this game allow kids to practice typing skills using the home row keys only, focused on the left side of the keyboard, or focusing on number words. In addition, kids can practice typing words in foreign languages such as Spanish, German and French.
  
  

Alpha Munchies

• In this free online game at AbcYa, you will practice typing fast as you block cartoon characters from hitting a wall made of square blocks on the bottom of the screen. You start the game by choosing a character, similar to an avatar. You then see falling critters, each of which has a letter, number or symbol, such as a semi-colon, on its head. As the critters fly from the sky, you will "catch" them by typing the corresponding letter on the keyboard. Kids can choose the easy, medium or hard level to play. If the critters do hit the wall, square blocks will fall away, causing an opening. If critters fall through the opening, kids lose points, and if they lose too many points the game will end.
  
  

Keyboarding Skills

• With this free online game from e-learning for Kids, you find yourself inside a space station set up to teach you how to type fast. Once inside the space station, you can learn about all the different areas of a keyboard, including the home row and the number keys. You can also practice your typing skills or put your skills to the test in a typing tournament. This interactive game is set up to provide you with immediate feedback as well as tips to help you get better at typing. Since there is instructional content in this game, which is the section in which you learn about the different keys, you must complete the sections in a specified order. Because of this, you create a sign-in name the first time you play, which will let you pick up where you left off when you return.