Coding and AI classes in Worthing

The learner downloads Gutenberg ebook 844 and writes a small parser. A line of capitals ending in a full stop, such as LADY BRACKNELL., starts a new speech; the lines after it belong to that speaker. Our run finds 877 speeches: 301 in the first act, 397 in the second and 179 in the third. Jack speaks most often, 218 times, with Algernon on 201 and Cecily on 152. The first trap appears at once. The cast list at the top calls him John Worthing, J.P., but the script never uses that name; every speech is labelled JACK. Joining the cast list to the speeches needs a mapping table, written by a person who has read the play.

Next the learner builds a transition matrix: nine speakers down the side, nine across the top, and in each cell the number of times the row speaker was followed by the column speaker. Only 50 of the 81 cells are ever used. Dividing each row by its total turns counts into shares, so the table can say that when Lady Bracknell finishes, Jack replies just over half the time. More traps wait here. The last speech of one act is not answered by the first speech of the next, so those two false pairs are dropped, leaving 874. The words ACT DROP and TABLEAU sit on their own lines and quietly attach themselves to the final speech unless the parser stops at them.

Stage directions in square brackets are the subtlest problem. They do not change who speaks, but they hold 1,608 words by our counting rule, which would inflate any talk-time measure. Twice a direction sits between two speeches by the same person, so the matrix gains a Jack to Jack cell and a Cecily to Cecily cell, and the learner must decide whether those are real. Finally, Jack's reply when asked for a house number is simply "149.", which a letters-only word counter scores as zero words. Each rule is written down beside the result.

Turning a text into honest numbers is a strong reason for Worthing teenagers to keep learning to code in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.