Coding and AI classes in South West England

Each line of a Met Office station file gives a month's average daily maximum and average daily minimum. Subtracting one from the other gives the average diurnal range for that month. The learner parses both files, keeps 1991 to 2020, confirms that all 360 months are present at each station, and averages each calendar month. Then comes a neat bit of algebra: because averaging is linear, the average of the differences equals the difference of the averages, and the program checks that the two routes agree to the last decimal.

Camborne's station sits about 2.4 kilometres from tidal water by our check against the ONS coastline boundary, and the sea changes temperature slowly, so it keeps nights mild and days cool. Yeovilton, about 17 kilometres from the nearest tidal water, heats and cools more freely. May tops both lists, most likely because its long days warm the afternoons while its nights can still be cold; by midsummer the nights are warmer too. The yearly averages are close, 11.11 at Camborne and 10.67 at Yeovilton, which shows how little an average alone can say about what a place feels like.

The slip worth hunting is confusing two kinds of range. The diurnal range is the gap within a typical day; the yearly range is the gap between the warmest and coldest months. At Camborne they are about 5 and 9 degrees, at Yeovilton about 8 and 12. Mix them in a report and the numbers look plausible but mean something else entirely. The learner labels every result with what it measures and writes a test that the yearly range is computed from monthly means, not from maxima and minima.

Pinning down what a number really measures is a good reason for a South West teenager to keep coding in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.