Hidden Letters

Vera recalls: "Hidden Letters was our most important program. It either randomly, or according to an algorithm chosen by the teacher, blanked out certain words in a text, which players then had to guess. It had various levels of difficulty. The one thing which we wanted, but could never manage with the memory in a Spectrum, was to get it to accept viable synonyms for words.#A revolutionary feature of Hidden Letters was an overlay which we manufactured for the Spectrum keyboard. I was concerned that young children learned lower case letters before capitals, and therefore were having difficulty with the Spectrum keyboard. The overlay was based on a piece of plastic, called a keyboard overlay, which could be bought, and which had cut outs for the keys, which fit over the keys and nicely stayed in place. I then had the lower-case keyboard silk screened on a piece of fairly flexible plastic, which I attached to the keyboard overlay with probably double-sided tape. This overlay then rode above the keys when the overlay was pushed down into place, and made life easier for little ones."