Coding classes in Arequipa, Peru

Sources: INEI, Censos Nacionales 2025, Indicadores demográficos, Cuadro 1 (census reference day 15 September 2025, population counted plus omitted); INEI, Perú: Perfil Sociodemográfico 2017, Cuadro N° 1.9 (census day 22 October 2017). INEI had not published 2025 figures for cities when we checked in November 2026, so the city row stays at 2017. The rows overlap and are never added together.

Sources: Ley General de Educación, Ley N.° 28044 (primaria lasts six years, secundaria five); MINEDU, Edades normativas (age measured on 31 March of each year); MINEDU, Currículo Nacional de la Educación Básica, plan de estudios and competency 28; MINEDU news on Fábrica de Programadores (July 2025). All read in November 2026.

Under the 2026 school-year norm, RM 501-2025-MINEDU, each regional education office (DRE) and UGEL has the power to set its own spread of teaching and planning weeks, so dates in Arequipa can differ from Lima's. That is one more reason our classes follow the family's calendar rather than any school calendar: they keep going through school holidays unless you pause them.

Course ages are ours. School years use MINEDU's normative ages at 31 March, so a child born late in the year may be one grade ahead or behind the row shown.

Families often tell us the English becomes a bonus: an hour of coding is also an hour of listening, explaining and asking questions in English, with a mentor who waits for the answer. For a child at a bilingual school, it is simply the language of the classroom; for a child at a Spanish-medium colegio, it is practice that comes free with every project.

import csv

def metres(text):
    digits = ""
    for ch in text:
        if ch.isdigit() or ch == ".":
            digits += ch
        elif ch.isalpha():
            break
    if digits == "":
        return None
    return float(digits)

colca = []
with open("inventario-atractivos-turisticos-arequipa.csv", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    for row in csv.DictReader(f):
        if row["Recurso - Provincia"] == "Caylloma":
            colca.append((metres(row["Recurso - Altitud"]), row["Recurso - Nombre"]))

colca.sort()
print("Places in Caylloma:", len(colca))
print("Lowest:", colca[0])
print("Next:", colca[1])
print("Highest:", colca[-1])

The answer says the Colca Canyon is three metres above sea level and the town of Chivay three and a half. Children laugh, and then the real work begins. Chivay is the easier case: the same file lists the Plaza Principal de Chivay at "3630 m.s.n.m", so "3.635" must be 3,635 written with a dot between the thousands, a common way of writing large numbers in Peru. The program read the dot as a decimal point.

The canyon is harder. "3 m.s.n.m" cannot be fixed by any rule, because nothing in the text says what the full number should be; a digit or more seems to have been lost when it was typed. The honest thing for a program to do is not to guess, but to flag it for a person to check.

import csv
import statistics

def metres(text):
    digits = ""
    for ch in text:
        if ch.isdigit() or ch == ".":
            digits += ch
        elif ch.isalpha():
            break
    if digits == "":
        return None
    whole, dot, rest = digits.partition(".")
    if dot and len(rest) == 3:      # Peru often writes 3.635 for 3,635
        return float(whole + rest)
    return float(digits)

places = []
with open("inventario-atractivos-turisticos-arequipa.csv", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    for row in csv.DictReader(f):
        m = metres(row["Recurso - Altitud"])
        if m is not None:
            places.append((row["Recurso - Provincia"], m, row["Recurso - Nombre"]))

by_province = {}
for prov, m, name in places:
    by_province.setdefault(prov, []).append(m)

for prov, m, name in places:
    middle = statistics.median(by_province[prov])
    if middle > 2000 and m < 100:
        print("Check by hand:", name, m, "in", prov, "middle", middle)

trusted = sorted((m, name) for prov, m, name in places
                 if prov == "Caylloma" and m >= 100)
print("Lowest we trust:", trusted[0])
print("Chivay now reads:", [m for m, name in trusted if name == "Pueblo De Chivay"])

Version 2 makes two changes. A dot followed by exactly three digits is treated as a thousands separator, which fixes Chivay and the Luicho hot springs in La Unión, written "2.722". And any place under 100 metres in a province whose middle altitude is over 2,000 metres is printed for a human to check. Only the canyon is caught. The lowest Caylloma attraction we can trust is the Sangalle valley at 1,900 metres, in the Cabanaconde district, the same district the file gives for the canyon. The twelve year old's guess was not far off.

Data: Gobierno Regional de Arequipa, Inventario de Atractivos Turísticos de Arequipa, Plataforma Nacional de Datos Abiertos, Open Data Commons Attribution Licence (ODC-By). Counts and medians are our own, from Version 2's cleaning. In the province of Arequipa the lowest place is the Laguna y Salinera de San Camilo in La Joya at 1,117 metres and the highest is the Chachani volcano at 5,760 metres; across the file, 96 places sit above 3,000 metres and 16 above 4,000. Two of the 338 rows belong to other departments, Ica and Cusco, and two have no altitude at all.

1. Under 8, pencil and paper. Write the number two thousand three hundred and thirty-five in four different ways on paper. Which ones would a friend read correctly?
2. Scratch, around 8 to 10. Put six heights from the table into a list and find the smallest. Then add "3" as a seventh height and watch it win.
3. First Python, around 10 to 12. Start with Version 1: explain the Chivay result in your own words, then write the thousands-separator fix before looking at ours.
4. Ages 13 and over. The file gives the Misti volcano 4,100 metres and the Chachani 5,760. Find out what each number measures, the summit or the place where visitors stand, and write a check that would warn you.
5. Going further. Count the 35 spellings yourself, then write one function that turns every one of them into a number or into a clear "cannot read".

Sources: UGEL 06, Oficio Múltiple 164-2026 on the XXII ONEM (levels, categories, the 8 July 2026 school stage, ten items, two hours); El Peruano, report of 11 October 2026 on the national stage; UTEC, opi.utec.edu.pe and the OPI 2025 rules. We do not reproduce any organiser's problems or solutions.

A practice problem of ours, in the contest spirit. A list of heights contains 2335, 2,335, 2.335 and 2 335. A careless program adds them as numbers. What total does it print if it reads the comma version as 2335, the dot version as 2.335 and the space version as 2335? Then: how many of the four did it read the way a person from Arequipa would? (Ours, written for this page. Answer: 7007.335, and three of four, because 2.335 should be 2,335.)

Peru keeps UTC minus 5 hours all year and has not used summer time since 1994 (tz database, zone America/Lima; INACAL publishes the official time). India keeps UTC plus 5 hours 30 minutes, so India is 10 hours 30 minutes ahead of Arequipa on every day of the year, and the gap never shifts.

Because neither country changes its clocks, a slot agreed in March is still the same slot in December. When you book, you pick the time in your own clock; the system shows the mentor the matching India time. School runs in Peru from March, and the 2026 school year opened on 16 March 2026 for 6,225,000 students in 53,631 schools across the country, so many Arequipa families use the long summer break at the start of the year to begin, then keep the same slot once school returns.