A Game Jam is COMING!
I bet you're wondering what theme we've come up with this time?....well let's find out...
It’s October which signals the end of the year is on the horizon, Halloween is around the corner, and here at The Code Zone we’re getting ready for our next Game Jam which kicks off on October 21st!
Usually in our clubs, members make changes to existing games that are ready to play, but the Game Jam provides an opportunity for our coders to get creative and make their own games and animations based on the provided theme. It’s an excellent way for our members to get creative, challenge themselves, and show off all of their coding knowledge!
As always, our amazing mentors will be there to answer any tricky coding questions so you can send them a message at any point. Members of our live clubs will also have an opportunity to work on their Game Jam projects during their regular club, and their mentors will also have a few extra ideas up their sleeves for anyone that isn’t sure where to start.
What if you prefer hacking the weekly games over making your own? Worry not, because that’s where our base games come in! If you choose to use a base game over starting in a blank project, you’ll be able to choose between a selection of game types such as a platformer or clicker style game.
The project will contain some pre-built code, but it’s still up to our coders to make the game their own and add in their own unique features.
At the end of the Game Jam, members can share their games to the Game Jam tab found on the dashboard. Other members of The Code Zone will be able to play your game and give you XP, and you can play everyone else’s games too!
Now that we all know what the Game Jam is and how it works, there’s just one more thing left to announce… the theme! As Halloween is fast approaching, we wanted to see some appropriately ghoulish games so the theme for the upcoming Game Jam is…
Don’t Look Under The Bed!
We can’t wait to see what our brilliant coders come up with, and we’ll also be releasing a video tomorrow to get everyone into the spooky spirit! We’ll see you for the Game Jam on October 21st and until then…
Not a member? Dont worry, our Game Jam's are free, sign up here: www.thecodezone.co.uk/join
Happy coding!
About our game jams
A game jam is a themed build: we announce a theme, and children across the clubs spend a few weeks making something from it. There is no brief beyond the theme and nothing to finish by a deadline you can fail. Children share what they made on our own platform, where chat and sharing between members is moderated by mentors.
Jams run alongside the ordinary weekly clubs rather than instead of them. A Game Dev Club session is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor each week.
Children build their own games rather than working through a set course, starting in Scratch or MakeCode and moving to Python and TypeScript when they are ready.
Past themes have included Evolution, Elemental Powers, The Wall of Doom and Strange Sports, and the results range from a two-screen platformer to something genuinely strange that only makes sense to its author. Both count. A jam is the one point in the year where the brief is deliberately loose, which is when children who normally follow instructions carefully surprise everybody.
Mentors write a note on every child after every session, which is how we know when somebody is ready to move up a level, or would rather stay where they are. Levels move down as readily as up, so the work always fits.
More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join, and in 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society.
Children can keep the camera off, type instead of speaking rather than being put on the spot, take a break without it disrupting anyone, and step away and come back.
Jams tend to be where that matters most: a deadline nobody set and a theme nobody has to interpret the same way is a much easier place to take a risk than a classroom is.
Live clubs run online across the UK and in person across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. Over 1,000 children are enrolled. In 2026 we were ranked second in the UK in Club Hub UK’s Top 100 Children’s Activity Providers, scored by five independent judges on safeguarding, inclusivity and community impact.
More like this
The blog is in two halves. Guides are the evergreen explainers written by the mentors who teach the clubs, covering the questions parents actually ask: what comes after Scratch, how to support a coding-mad child when you cannot code yourself, and what works for autistic and ADHD children.
Club news is the other half, and it is where posts like this one live: game jams, Minecraft builds and weekly roundups, written up by whoever ran the session. Neither is marketing. If you want to know what an hour actually looks like before you book anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.
The first session is a free taster and we do not ask for card details. Book a free taster session, see what it costs, or read about support for neurodivergent children.
