Coding classes in Worcestershire

The learner copies the museum's rules into Python as a dictionary from year to mark, then builds the reverse dictionary from mark to year. The first test is whether any two years share a mark; across the 100 years the page codes, from 1867 to 1941, 1949 to 1956 and 1990 to 2006, none do. The second test is to look for surprises, and there are several.

The dots are the most instructive part. Adding a dot each year is easy for a worker to apply and to check, but it grows without limit: by 1915 the mark carried 24 dots. A binary pattern, where each of five fixed positions is either dotted or blank, could show any year up to 31 with at most five dots, and would have used 54 dots in total over those 24 years instead of 300. The factory's answer was different but clever: when the dots grew too many, it introduced a new symbol and started counting again. That is the same idea as a digit carrying into the next column.

The last row is a small lesson for the computer age. After 1990 a single digit gave the year within the decade, so 1991 and 2001 would both be "1". The solution was to write 2001 as "01": the number of digits carries the information. Programmers who stored years as just two digits met a similar kind of problem around the year 2000.

So a young person in Worcestershire should learn to code in 2026 to understand how information is represented before trusting what a machine reads from it. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.