Coding and AI classes in High Wycombe

We read the museum's online chair search page and counted its records ourselves: 54 in all. The place made reads High Wycombe on 25, names another place on 13, says "Unknown" on 4 and is blank on 12. The learner stores the records as a list of dictionaries in Python and counts them with a single loop. Then comes the real question: what fraction of these chairs were made in High Wycombe?

Both of the first two answers are easy to compute and easy to defend, yet they differ by almost 20 points. The first quietly assumes every missing place was somewhere else; the second assumes the missing records look just like the known ones. Neither assumption is checked. Working out the highest and lowest possible shares gives a range that needs no assumption at all: whatever the gaps hide, the true share among these records lies between about 46 and 76 per cent. Reporting that range, with the reason, is more honest than either single number.

The learner then checks the dates: 48 records have a year, 6 do not, running from 1685 to 1974 with a middle value of 1875. Two traps come up. Treating "Unknown" as a real place called Unknown puts it in the league table of towns; and "High Wycombe" with a trailing space or different capitals splits one town into two. The code normalises names before counting and tests that the three groups always add back to 54. These are our own counts of one web page, not the museum's full catalogue.

Asking what happened to the blanks is a practical reason for a High Wycombe teenager to keep coding in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.