Type Rush: Design for Educational Games

Crit 2 for 05418-Design Educational Games, Prof. Erik Harpstead, CMU

Basic Information

TypeRush
Link to the game: https://www.typerush.com/account.html?play=1
Developer: Typing Master Finland Inc
Platform: Browser-based but now available on Android & iOS
The game is aimed at improving typing speed by playing racing games.

Brief Description

TypeRush is a game designed to test and improve a player’s typing abilities. Players join an online multiplayer game where they would be racing with four other players. Each player is represented by a car and the speed of the car is dependent on how quickly and accurately the player types the text that is displayed on the screen. Players are allowed to choose between two modes — single row or double row of text. The speed, accuracy, and rank that a player earns in each race determine the virtual coins, XP and overall points that a player earns at the end of a race. The coins can be traded for better-looking cars, and the XP gives access to better cars. The game is additionally divided into a country-wise league with a leaderboard where players are ranked based on Words per minute, XPs they have earned and overall points. There also exists an international leaderboard for the best players to look at where they stand compared to the other typist-racers in the world.

Educational Objectives -

What knowledge or skills do players need to have before starting the game?
In terms of prior knowledge required for the game, a player needs to know the letterforms that are displayed on the screen and should be able to match the form and know possibly how to enter them into the keyboard. Thus, a basic level of literacy is the most important necessity in the game. It is important to note that the sentences that appear on screen include a healthy mix of punctuation marks as well. Thus, it is necessary to identify those as well and match them all with their corresponding keys on the keyboard as fast as possible to get the best result. The faster a player can read the sentences, the better it is for the player. Additionally, knowing the locations of the keys on the keyboard — be it QWERTY or DVORAK — is also a massive advantage to be able to type quicker — and thus drive the car faster.

What knowledge or skills can players reasonably be expected to learn from the game?
The most direct skill that players of this game can take away from the game is an increased typing speed. Looking at it from a different perspective, the game is a competitive way of testing a player’s typing speed and making it more addictive by including more elements to it such as cars, coins, points, and a league.

What knowledge and skills might they learn that go beyond what they encountered in the game?
At its core, the game is quite simple and has a singular objective — to type as fast as possible, as accurately as possible. It doesn’t take long for the players to realize that the best strategy to do that is one of the two — either memorize long parts of the sentences and then look at the keyboard and type them out, or to not look at the keyboard at all and keep typing while looking at the screen. The latter strategy leads to much better hand-eye coordination in the players which is a major takeaway for anyone who plays this game. Additionally, constant reading and correcting sentences lead to a better understanding of spellings and grammar.

MDA — Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics

Mechanics: The game is based on simple mechanics and is based on a linear two-dimensional car race. The player can choose whether he wishes to view one or two lines of text while typing depending on what he is comfortable with. The participating cars, belonging to a mixture of real players as well as bots from around the world line up at the start line before the race. The sentence that is to be typed can already be seen while the countdown timer starts — thus allowing players time to memorize the sentence if they wish to. As soon as the race starts, the rest of the game is quite simple — the player has to type the sentence exactly as it appears, including the punctuation marks in the right places, in the area on the screen right under the race track. The car keeps speeding up and makes a revving sound and the letter is deactivated and turns transparent if what has been typed has been correct. Alternately, the car slows down and produces a screeching sound and the letters are highlighted in red if the typed content has been wrong. The first car across the finish line wins the race. At the end of the race, the player’s stats such as typing speed and accuracy are displayed on the screen and he is also given coins to make purchases towards better cars and XP and points to contribute towards the position in the league.

Dynamics: The fact that the car’s speed depends directly on the typing speed and accuracy of the player, it becomes obvious early on that the players need to adopt a strategy that betters their speed and accuracy. As mentioned earlier, they can choose between either memorizing long parts of a sentence, or typing without looking at a keyboard. Depending on the player, either strategy could work better, subject to the player’s skill levels. However, a majority of the players initially go with the memorizing strategy. But this strategy is prone to mistakes due to misremembering parts of the sentences such as punctuation marks. However, going for the no-look typing strategy gives a bigger advantage, but the skill itself has a slower learning curve. Given the game’s format, it can make players keep coming back to improve their average typing speed, or their accuracy, or their position in the league, or even simply to earn more coins and buy a better car. These visits back to the game end up contributing more to the skill curve of the player and ultimately making them a much faster and better typist.

Aesthetics: The feeling and emotional state created by the game which is that of urgency. The sound played a huge role in reinforcing the time urgency. There was also an aesthetic of Competition which is of a mix of challenge and fellowship. Overall simplicity also made the game quite addictive in general. No players I tested with, played the game only once. There was a sense of oh I need to do better. And of course, our good old challenge aesthetic.

Instructional Principles —

Principle 1:Segmenting- The game does a great job of segmenting. Keeping the race short and helping players test out skills in short sprints. Instead of having long races, there are short bursts of races which in turn also increases the replayability of the game.

Principle 2: Guided Attention: Provide explicit instructions as needed to help the player anticipate where they should focus their attention. Verbal cues may accompany visuals to describe unfamiliar objects or explain unobvious processes. Each text description should be near the visual element it describes. The game does a brilliant job of providing guided attention to the players as and when required. For instance, as seen in the image below the player typed the correct letter ‘f,’ but is required to type an upper case ‘F’ and is thus prompted by the game to do the right thing.

Principle 3: Immediate Feedback: Provide immediate feedback on errors. The game provides immediate feedback in visual as well as audio form. As soon as an incorrect character is typed, the car slows down and the tires make a screeching noise, while the pending character in the text window appears red. Alternately, when the typed content is correct, the car speeds up and the entered characters start becoming transparent in the text area.

Synthesis & Critique

The game has simple and straightforward mechanics and dynamics, that are easy to understand and get around. These are well supported by a very straightforward educational objective. The learning principles do provide adequate assistance to the objectives, and the mechanics and dynamics of the game. However, it would have been nice for the game to have a trial/tutorial before actually starting the game since they didn’t have any onboarding instructions and the player ends up spending the first five seconds figuring out that they have to essentially match the text as it is. It would have also been great if the difficulty increased with each level or the kind of tasks or challenges changed as per the level. Eg. Type a particular sentence in 20 seconds in level 10, Achieve 100% accuracy in level 20 etc.