Technology

Computer keyboard

A keyboard to play with and a screen to type on, plus fun facts about computers.

Tap the keys to type, and watch your words appear on the screen. Nothing you type is saved, so play as much as you like. On a computer, you can also tap the screen and use your real keyboard.

Start typing…

Turn your phone sideways to see the whole computer keyboard.

Tip: press Shift, Caps Lock, Backspace, Enter, Tab or the space bar to find out what it does.

Try these

Type “typewriter”. It only uses letters from the top row!
Type “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. It uses every letter of the alphabet.
Make a smiley face: type a colon, then a close bracket :)
Type a word in capitals using Caps Lock, like HELLO.

Keys to know

Shift: Hold it down and press a letter to make a capital, or a number key to get the symbol on top. Here you can tap Shift first, then the key.
Caps Lock: Turns capital letters on, and they stay on until you press it again. The little light shows when it's on.
Backspace: Rubs out the letter just before the cursor.
Enter: Starts a new line. It's also used to send a message or say OK.
Tab: Jumps forward a few spaces. On a web page it also moves you to the next button or box.
Space bar: Puts a gap between words. It's the biggest key because it's the one we press most.

Fun facts

Why “QWERTY”?Look at the top row of letters: Q, W, E, R, T, Y. The most common English keyboard is named after these six letters.
Older than computersThe QWERTY layout was made in the 1870s for typewriters, long before computers were invented.
Feel for the bumpsThe F and J keys have tiny bumps. Your pointer fingers rest on them, so you can find your place without looking.
The biggest keyThe space bar is the biggest key because it's the one we press most often.
Every letter at once“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet. A sentence like that is called a pangram.
Top row wordYou can type the word “typewriter” using only the top row of letters.
Letters are numbersComputers store everything as 1s and 0s, called binary. Every key you press is turned into a number. A capital A is the number 65.
A real bugIn 1947, people found a moth stuck inside a computer. They taped it into their notebook and wrote “first actual case of bug being found”.
Room-sized computersOne of the first computers, ENIAC, weighed about 27 tonnes and filled a whole room. A phone today is far more powerful.
Made in AustraliaCSIRAC, built in Sydney in 1949, was one of the world's first computers and one of the first to play music. You can see it at Melbourne Museum.
A wooden mouseThe first computer mouse, made in the 1960s, had a wooden case and one button.
Handy shortcutsHold Ctrl (or ⌘ on a Mac) and press C to copy, then V to paste. Z undoes a mistake.