BlackCat Numbers, Words and Pictures

BlackCat was a brand of Granada Learning, originally part of the ITV group. Numbers, Words and Pictures 2 was their flagship product, a suite of programs intended to teach IT skills children between seven and eleven years old.
The suite consisted of:

• Counting Pictures 3: A simple charting program.
• Painter 2: A bitmap based drawing application.
• Pick-a-Picture 2: Taught the basics of data handling, by allowing pictures to be grouped into categories.
• Turtle 2: A gentle introduction to Logo.
• Writer 2: A very basic word processor.

My responsibility was Painter 2.

Development had already been handled, but not completed, by teams based in Manchester and India. Much of the initial workload was refactoring the code base to ensure that it compiled and ran.

The main technical challenge was that the UI had to be scalable and customisable to meet the capabilities of the users. An eleven year old would be more capable than a seven year old.

The solution was to allow for gadgets to be either deactivated or substituted, and the tool bar populated to suit. The application shipped with several pre-set levels, and teachers could create their own by dragging and dropping icons into position.