About Typing with Mog

A free touch-typing game for kids, built by a mum for her daughter Bit, and starring a very real cat.

Why I made this

I'm a software developer and a mum. When my daughter Bit turned eleven, I knew she was about to start using the computer a lot more for school, and I wanted her to learn touch typing before two-finger habits set in. I also knew that a list of drills would last about two days. So I encouraged Bit to learn through a game instead, and remembered the typing games I loved as a kid: a character running across the screen, jumping every time you hit the right key. I could not find anything quite like that which was free, ad-light and didn't ask her to create an account.

So I built one. Typing with Mog shows both hands on screen and lights up the exact finger you should use for the next key, because that is the part beginners struggle with most. The texts you type are excerpts from classic children's books, so practice sessions feel like reading a story rather than drilling random letters.

Who is Mog?

Mog is our family's ginger tabby, and a mother: her son Finn, just as ginger and twice as noisy, lives with us too. Mog has been with us longer than any other pet, so when the game needed a name there was really only one choice. The pixel-art Mog runs forward when you type correctly, jumps for a coin at the end of every word, and stumbles (very briefly, no cats were harmed) when you press the wrong key. Finn mostly supervises.

What I hope for

Bit is still learning. Some days Mog collects every coin; other days she stumbles a lot and we call it a night after ten minutes. But her eyes stay on the screen now instead of on her hands, and that is the part that matters. I hope Typing with Mog helps other children find the same enjoyment in learning to touch type: not as a chore, but as a small game with a cat cheering them on.

The site is free and always will be. It is supported by a small number of ads placed at the edges of the page, never inside the game area.

About the texts

All longer passages are from books in the public domain: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Peter Pan (1911), The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) and The Wind in the Willows (1908). They were lightly adjusted (straight quotes, no special dashes) so every character can be typed on a standard keyboard.

Have a question, found a bug, or want to suggest a book? Get in touch.