The latest on all the mods and hacks available this week to test your kids' coding skills!
For our Hacker Level club members, we're introducing a quirky game called "Bin It". A fun little precision testing title where players must toss a ball of paper into a bin. It's a simple concept, but it's addictively fun!
Through a few simple code changes, those following our set guided hack of the week will be creating a series of powerups that players can nab to get some of their time back.
However, this game uses a velocity mechanic using variables which makes it very tricky to pull back the mouse and fire the paper into the bin. Our hackers loved the challenge! We spent a lot of the session coding different ways to make this difficult game more manageable for the players.
First things firsts was our Guided Hack. This week, we showed our young coders how to code a power-up which grants the player more time when it was hit with the paper. Using cloning code along with randomised time and placement code, the timer power-up would appear throughout the stage at different spots and times. We also added in an animation for when the timer power-up appeared and disappeared - changing the size of the timer with repeat blocks to give the illusion of it popping in and out of the game.
Our hackers took this week's Guided Hack and made it their own; duplicating the timer power-up scripts, our members were able to change the power-up from granting us extra time to giving us extra points just by editing the code's variable - neat! They also took inspiration from the animation script by copying it to other sprites and editing the effect. Many of my members would make the bin disappear and reappear in order to make the game even more challenging, whereas others changed the colour effect of the background to give the whole game a more fun rainbow theme.
Our Modder Level club members have spent their sessions delving deeper into the eerie corridors of "Shadowy Shootout". With the new update, we have a guided hack that will walk you through the creation of doors that open when the player is nearby.
By exploring this guided hack, these boys and girls have had some further practice with collision detection and proximity sensing to help create interactive and dynamic environments in their games.
As always, we encourage you to share your modded games with the club. Show us how you've mastered the fine art of precision in "Bin It" or how you've enhanced the spookiness of "Shadowy Shootout" with your proximity-activated doors!
What a week in the clubs looks like
Posts like this one are what actually happens in a session, written by the mentors
who ran it. A Game Dev Club session is one hour a
week, in a group of no more than six, with the same mentor every week, online or at
one of our in-person clubs.
That cap is
deliberate: it is what makes it possible for a mentor to notice when a child has
gone quiet, or has rebuilt the same game four weeks running because they are
avoiding something harder.
Children build their own games rather than working through a set course.
Levels move down as readily as up, so the work always fits, and
staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome. Every mentor is DBS-checked and
STEM-certified.
Most children start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when
they are ready. Mentors write a note on every child after every session, which is
how we know when somebody is ready to move up, and it is why a child who has gone
quiet for three weeks does not simply go unnoticed.
More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents
tell us when they join. Children can keep the camera off, type instead of
speaking, take a break without it disrupting anyone, and step away and come back.
In 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society,
and in 2026 we were ranked second in the UK in Club Hub UK’s Top 100
Children’s Activity Providers.
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.
