Welcome back to “Return to the Computer Lab,” our semi-regular miniseries within the Friday Know-It-All in which our editorial staff explore the beloved computer games of our childhoods. (Are you surprised to learn many of us spent a lot of time on the computer?) In our latest iteration, Brand Engagement Director Brianna attempts a voyage through space and search to relive Type to Learn gaming.
The year was 2001. The sixth graders of Birch Grove Elementary in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota had recently become acquainted with collective trauma via the attack on the World Trade Center at the beginning of their school day months prior. War was starting, we’d witnessed our teachers crying, and we were doing what our generation would come to be experts in through the remaining decades: Dissociating via digital gaming.
Our computer lab’s educational programming of choice was “Type to Learn,” an entity owned by Sunburst Digital Learning that has created educational typing exercises for almost as long as I have been alive. “Typing class was an important part of our curriculum that we likely did not take seriously enough at the time,” Brianna typed, using the “chicken peck” method the software was trying to actively dissuade, “and we probably should have spent more time on it each week than we did on our cursive.” The orange silicone keyboard covers evoked memories of the Nickelodeon shows that used to wait for us at home as we counted the minutes to the final bell. I distinctly remember feeling like my hand muscles were going to give up in protest.
Even so, my fellow classmates and I all worked through our typing lessons as quickly as possible to embark on the best part of our week: space travel.
Your (space) mission, should you choose to accept it
I am sure “Type to Learn” had other educational games in its software, but at our school — or at least in our graduating class — the Solar System typing game was the pinnacle of learning and leisure. Players began their journey at the sun with a short typing challenge. If successful, players would advance further out in the system to Mercury, and so forth as subsequent challenges — which steadily increased in difficulty — were completed successfully. At one point, meteors would attempt to throw you off course with a fast-reaction challenge. Because Pluto was still considered a planet in my youth, the final test took place on our system’s smallest-at-the-time planet.
If successful, an epic chorus of rock music (performed by a band that I can only assume resembled every hair metal band my mom listened to in the car) would announce your win. We of course flew right back to the sun and started all over again, until it was inevitably time for the next class to take their turn in the computer lab. I recall that students in my class would often start the game at the same time as someone else and attempt to race to Pluto, seeing who could reach the planet first without errors in their typing. I got pretty good at it by the end of my elementary education. Did the long-term lessons stick? Of course not — why should I take care with how I type if there is no space travel as my reward? And so here I peck, to this day.
“Much too old”
I have tried — and failed — to find a video of this game. At one point I thought I’d discovered a YouTube demo, but I didn’t save it and haven’t been able to find it since. The quantity of variations on “type to learn space game” I have entered into both Google and YouTube is vast. I’ve found several examples from “Type to Learn 3,” and audio of the “Type to Learn 2” intro; “Type to Learn” is now on its fifth generation of software. I attempted an inquiry to Type to Learn to see if they had a video demo of this vintage game, but unfortunately the response was “‘Type to Learn 2’ is much too old, we don't have much from that in our archive, if anything at all. And that game you're describing is not in the current version of ‘Type to Learn.’ I'm sorry we can't help!”
Did I dream up this game? Is this a case of the Mandela Effect unique to the Birch Grove Bobcats? I concluded my search with the most scientific of experiments: I asked friends on Facebook. I hope that perhaps one of my fellow Bobcat alumni would have better internet sleuthing skills. A classmate did find photos (shown above), which helped me confirm this was indeed real, but sadly no videos (yet).
If anyone can indeed find a video of this, please send it to me — I would like to re-experience an adventure through space, just one more time. I even promise to keep my fingers curved, wrists flat, feet flat, and sit up straight.
