Online coding and Python classes in Wigston

The learner fetches the Oadby and Wigston boundary from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass service and joins its pieces into one closed ring of 1,156 points. Measured flat, our ring encloses 23.33 square kilometres and runs 31.04 km round; these are our own measurements of the mapped line, not official statistics. Two simplifiers then thin the ring to the same number of points. One keeps every n-th point. The other is Visvalingam-Whyatt, written with Python's heapq module so the least important point is always on top.

Largest shift is the furthest any original point ends up from the simplified outline. At every level the area-based method stays closer, and the gap is widest where it matters: with half the points gone it moves nothing more than 9 m, while the every-n-th shortcut has already cut a 93 m corner. Even at 58 points, a twentieth of the original, the enclosed area is within 0.10%. One measure does drift under both methods: the boundary length falls from 31.04 km to 26.52 km at 5%, because smoothing out wiggles always shortens a line. Reaching 58 points took 3,229 heap operations, far fewer than re-scanning every point each time would need.

Measuring what a shortcut loses gives Wigston teenagers a practical check on AI output, and Python is where they learn to run it in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.