Stone by Stone

How to use it

• Ten minutes is a whole session. One stone a day. Pointing and typing are motor skills — short and daily beats long and once.
• Nothing is timed or scored. A wrong move simply doesn't advance the stone. There is no way to lose.
• Let them choose the path. Hands and keys are independent skills; they can be learned in either order, or side by side.

Why it is built this way

• The Hand follows Fitts's law. How hard a target is to hit depends on how far away and how small it is. Each step raises exactly one of those, in order, so difficulty climbs smoothly instead of in jumps.
• The stones pull back. As the pointer closes in, the stone leans toward it, a halo opens, the wind gathers and a tone rises — feedback on approach, not just on arrival, which is what teaches aiming rather than luck.
• The last hand step follows the steering law. Dragging along a path is a different skill from tapping a point — it's what menus, sliders, and selecting text all need — so it gets its own practice.
• The Keys cover the whole keyboard — every letter, the punctuation, Shift and the number row — introduced two keys at a time, beginning at F and J, the keys with the ridges. Every word it asks for is built only from letters already learned, so your child never hunts for a key they have not met. Unlearned keys stay dim on the map below.
• Missed letters come back more often, mixed in among ones already known. Spacing the hard ones out beats drilling them in a block.

Worth showing them yourself

• On a Chromebook, tapping with two fingers is a right-click and sliding two fingers scrolls. The magnifying-glass Search key sits where Caps Lock lives on other laptops.
• The tiny ridges on F and J are how touch typists find home without looking. They are the whole reason the keyboard path starts there.
• Progress is saved in this browser. Bookmark this page on the laptop they use.