Online coding and Python classes in Rugby

The learner downloads the plain text and keeps only the novel between Project Gutenberg's start and end markers. The first idea is a toggle: every time a double quotation mark appears, flip between "inside speech" and "outside speech", and count the letters on each side. It reports that 54.2 per cent of the book is dialogue. That feels too high, and the learner is right to be suspicious.

The fix is a finite state machine with two states, outside and inside, where an opening mark always means inside and a closing mark always means outside, whatever came before. The machine also resets to outside at every new paragraph. That matters because Victorian printers used a convention: when one person's speech runs over several paragraphs, each new paragraph opens with a quotation mark but the previous one is left without a closing mark. Eight of the nine unclosed speeches are exactly that, including two passages of verse. The toggle never recovers from them; the state machine never notices.

The ninth is different. Tom's father asks, "Is your money all safe?" and the next paragraph is Tom's reply, so the closing mark seems simply to be missing from the e-text. The learner's program prints every paragraph where the counts disagree, and a human reads them. Then come the tests: a made-up paragraph with a continued speech, one with a missing close, and one full of apostrophes such as "Tom's" and "isn't", which must not change the answer.

For Rugby teenagers, the habit of measuring instead of guessing makes a solid case for staying with code in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.