Coding and AI classes in Ipswich

The learner downloads the Project Gutenberg text, skips the contents list, and splits the novel at each chapter heading, 57 in all. The first search looks for the exact letters "Ipswich" and finds 21. A second search that ignores capital letters finds 22. The difference is chapter XXII, whose heading is printed in capitals: MR. PICKWICK JOURNEYS TO IPSWICH. A case-sensitive search would have missed the one place where the town appears in a chapter title.

Next comes the concordance itself, often called keyword in context. For every match the program prints forty characters before and after, lined up so the town's name sits in a straight column down the middle. Then it sorts the lines by the word that follows. Patterns jump out at once: two lines read "Ipswich coach", several begin "at Ipswich", and one records a letter addressed to "Mr. Nupkins's, Mayor's, Ipswich, Suffolk". The sorted view shows how Dickens uses the place, mostly as a destination and an address.

The second trap is word boundaries. Searching for a short word such as "wich" would match Ipswich, Norwich and Greenwich alike, so the program searches for whole words only and tests that rule on invented sentences. The learner also checks the count per 10,000 words, because a long chapter with seven mentions and a short one with five are not equally about Ipswich. Chapter XX, in which a character talks of working an Ipswich coach, has the highest rate.

Being able to check an answer line by line is exactly what learning to code gives Ipswich teenagers in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.