Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We purchased Type to Learn, despite its non-competitive home pricing, because my 12 year old daughter really liked the TTL product she had used at school and insisted that she would use this voluntarily all summer. In the end, we have made little progress because both of my kids have come to loathe the program, for good reasons. Overall, the product seems to be an overpriced afterthought by a company that caters primarily to the large-scale educational market, and is not particularly interested in serving home users. See below for the detailed comments I submitted to TTL product support: Things the kids dislike: 1) All or nothing structure that makes it easy to get stuck on a particular game or test. 2) Forced repeat from the beginning with single errors in some of the games/tests. 3) Inability to advance without completing all the games. I have been typing them through sticking points, just to ease the frustration. Both my 9 year old boy and my mature 12 year old girl have been repeatedly reduced to tears by the unforgiving structure. 4) They find the plot and narration annoying and anxiety provoking, rather than fun. We have turned off the audio component to reduce the stress. Things I dislike: 1) In Mac OSX.6, we were unable to run TTL4 in the children's non-admin profiles. Tech support offered to help with this, but it was not worth the time it would take to sort it out. I worked around the issue by creating multiple users under my own admin profile, and logging them in each time. (So much for the fantasy of this being a game they would play on their own initiative, w/out my intervention.) 2) TTL4 takes over the desktop in a way that circumvents autoswitching between programs or automatic sleep settings. 3) Reviews of this product suggested that it gave instruction in and structurally encouraged good ergonomic practices. We have found no such thing so far, unless it is buried deep within the annoying, superfluous narration that my children now just skip. 4) All of the things my children dislike. While there's not a lot that can be done about the plot, it should be easy to introduce settings that allow different standards for progressing through the game. I understand the skill-building reasoning behind the structure of this game, but it is very poorly executed. Minor lapses amount to "failures" that are convincing my kids that typing is impossible. The program does not allow for developmental issues that mean some people will necessarily fudge some aspects of keyboarding. My children both have lax joints in their hands, which makes both writing and keyboard work painful -- thus my interest in the reputed ergonomic superiority of Type to Learn. The program instead punishes them for attempting to work around their issues. After a month of fighting to make this work, we are giving up and trying a different program. I would like a refund.