Mouse and trackpad practice: one small step at a time

The mouse and the trackpad

• The pointer is the small arrow on the screen. It goes where the mouse goes: slide the mouse on the table and the arrow moves the same way. If you run out of table, lift the mouse, set it down somewhere else and keep going; the arrow stays put while the mouse is in the air.
• The left button is the one used for nearly everything. One press and let go is a click. It presses the button, opens the link or puts a mark in the box the pointer is on.
• A double-click is two clicks of the left button, close together, with the mouse held still. On many computers it is how a file or a program on the desktop is opened. On web pages, one click is nearly always enough.
• The right button opens a short menu of things that can be done with whatever the pointer is on. A click of the left button somewhere else closes that menu without doing anything.
• The wheel between the buttons, if the mouse has one, moves a long page up and down.
• A trackpad is the flat rectangle below the keys of a laptop. Slide one finger on it to move the pointer, and press down on it to click. On many laptops a light tap is a click too, sliding two fingers moves the page, and pressing with two fingers is a right-click. Laptops differ, and the settings of each one say what its trackpad does.
• The pointer changes shape. Over a link it often turns into a small hand, and over a place to type it turns into a thin upright line.
• If you use the mouse with your left hand, or the pointer moves too fast or too slow, or double-clicks are hard to do quickly enough, look in the computer’s mouse settings. Windows and macOS both let you swap the two buttons and change the pointer speed and the double-click speed. On a library or office computer, the staff can do it for you.

How the lessons work

• Lessons 1 to 3 are moving and clicking. A red square with a number comes up in the practice box; when you reach it, the next one comes up somewhere else. In lesson 3 the squares shrink, step by step, to a third of the width of the first ones.
• Lesson 4 is the double-click and lesson 5 is the right button. In lesson 5, inside the practice box and nowhere else, the page holds back the menu the right button would open, so the square can answer instead.
• Lesson 6 is dragging: press on the solid square, keep the button down, carry it into the dashed box and let go.
• Lesson 7 is a list of 60 lines with one button somewhere in the lower part. You go down the list to find it, three times.
• Lesson 8 is a small form of the kind every application has: a box to check, a round button, a list that drops down, a box to type one word in, and a button at the end. The form goes nowhere; the button only ends the lesson.
• The page waits. There is no countdown, and taking a long time costs nothing. At the end it says how long the lesson took, from the moment the pointer first went into the practice box, and in lessons 2 to 5 how many clicks landed outside a square.
• “Start this lesson again” puts the squares in new places.

Every time the page is built, a program makes 16,000 lessons and reads each one back with arithmetic written apart from the page’s own: that every square and box is fully inside the practice box at 13 widths from a narrow phone to a wide screen, that the next square never comes up in the same part of the box, and that the square to drag never starts inside the dashed box.

What this page does not do

• It cannot see your hand, your mouse or which finger you use. It only knows what the browser tells it: where the pointer is and which button went down.
• It does not teach a touch screen. On a phone or tablet the clicking lessons run with a tap, but the right-click and double-click lessons may not answer, and dragging with a finger is not the same motion as dragging with a mouse.
• It does not change any setting on your computer, and it cannot tell you where the settings of your own computer are beyond what is written above.
• It has no lessons for the keyboard (that is Typing practice), for windows and files, or for staying safe from scams online.
• It does not keep your times or which lessons you have done. To see a change over weeks, write the numbers down somewhere of your own.
• It gives no certificate and makes no promise about how fast anyone will learn.
• It is built for a pointer, so it is of little use to someone who works a computer by keyboard alone or with a screen reader. It has not been tried with a screen reader, a switch, an eye tracker or a head pointer.
• It is not advice about your hands. If using a mouse hurts, stop and rest; pain that keeps coming back is a thing to bring to a doctor or a nurse.