Coding classes in Anglesey

The plan is a simplified model inspired by the record, not a survey. The learner places points for four towers on an inner square and eight turrets on an outer square around it. A square can be moved onto itself in exactly eight ways: turn it by 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, or flip it across one of four lines, the north-south line, the east-west line and the two diagonals. For each of the eight moves, the program transforms every point and checks whether the moved plan lands exactly on the original. The moves that pass are the plan's symmetries.

The bare rings have the full symmetry of a square, eight moves. Add a gate to the middle of the north and south sides and the quarter turns fail, because a quarter turn would carry the north gate to the east side, where there is none, and the diagonal flips fail for the same reason. Four symmetries remain. Shift the north gate towards the east, as the record describes the real one, and even those fail: only the identity, the move that changes nothing, survives. A plan that looks symmetrical at a glance can have no symmetry at all.

The symmetries also form a group, which the learner checks by composing every pair. For the four-move plan, doing any two in a row always gives one of the same four, and flipping across both axes gives the half turn. In the full set of eight, order matters: turning a quarter and then flipping is not the same as flipping and then turning, a first meeting with operations that do not commute, just like rotations in 3D graphics.

Turning a confident claim into a test is why a young person on Anglesey should still learn to code in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.