Dance Mat Typing

The course is built the same shape as the classic four-level, three-stage structure. Level 1 keeps your hands on the home row and adds keys in pairs: d f j k, then a s l ;, then g h. Level 2 reaches up to the top row, Level 3 drops to the bottom row, and Level 4 finishes with capitals, numbers and punctuation. Clear six words and the next stage unlocks.

The keyboard drawn under the word is the whole point. The next key you need glows, and the eight home-row keys stay shaded so your fingers have somewhere to return to between reaches. Looking at the screen keyboard instead of your hands is what eventually turns into touch typing.

The original was built in Adobe Flash. Every major browser removed Flash support in early 2021, and BBC Bitesize never rebuilt the game in HTML5, so the page no longer loads anything playable. There is nothing to fix on your end and no plugin that brings it back — the software it needed does not exist in modern browsers.

This game is our own, written from scratch in plain JavaScript. It is not the BBC's game, not a port of it, and not affiliated with the BBC in any way. What it shares is the teaching method: home row first, keys introduced in small groups, twelve short stages instead of one long lesson. If you came here looking for the original, that method is the part worth keeping.

Level 1 covers the home row on its own, which is where most people who "can't type" actually get stuck — the hands never learn a resting position, so every word starts with a hunt. Level 2 adds the top row while keeping home-row anchors in every word, so you practise reaching up and coming back rather than reaching and drifting.

Level 3 brings in the bottom row, the row most self-taught typists use worst, and finishes with a whole-keyboard stage. Level 4 is the part free typing courses usually skip: capitals with the shift key, the number row, and everyday punctuation like apostrophes and hyphens. Real writing is full of those, so a course that stops at letters leaves you slow where it counts.

The stage length is deliberately short — six words — because a seven-year-old will finish a stage in a minute or two and see progress immediately. There is no timer and no score pressure during a stage; the only fail condition is three wrong keys, which resets the run rather than punishing a slow one.

For a classroom there is nothing to install, no student accounts to create and no ads. If you want a gentler starting point for very young players, the animal typing game uses short animal names with no timer at all. When the home row feels automatic, Keyboard Jump is the natural next step, and the full age-sorted lineup is on our typing games for kids page.