AI and programming classes in Middlesbrough

The learner sends the word Marton to a free public place-name search built on Ordnance Survey data and gets 25 results back. The first step is filtering: Long Marton, Marton-le-Moor, Great Marton and the rest share the letters but are different names, so the program keeps only exact matches. That leaves 12. Each comes with a county, a type such as village or suburban area, and a latitude and longitude. The question is how to choose.

The biography supplies context: Cook's mother was a native of Cleveland, and his sister married a Redcar fisherman. The learner looks up Redcar, a single unambiguous town, and computes the straight-line distance from it to each Marton. Middlesbrough's Marton comes first at 12.8 kilometres; the next is 43.9 kilometres away in North Yorkshire. A margin that wide makes the answer convincing, though the learner writes down that it is an inference from clues, not a fact the gazetteer states.

Then comes the harder half. The same search for Morton returns 23 places, and none of them is in Middlesbrough or Redcar and Cleveland. The Morton in the parish of Ormsby that Kitson mentions is simply not in the modern gazetteer under that name. The learner's program must be able to say "no confident match" instead of picking the nearest wrong one, and a test checks that it does. That is the real lesson in disambiguation: knowing when to refuse.

Knowing when a program should refuse to guess is the kind of judgement that makes coding worth learning for Middlesbrough teenagers in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.