Can you 'Dodge It'?

By The Code Zone team 26 March 2023 1 min read

A quick overview of what happened in our Game Dev Club!

A great week last week in GameDev Club with the game: 'Dodge it!'. The aim of the game is to help your Zonebot survive as long as possible by avoiding the canons balls being shot across the screen. The longer Zonebot survives, the more canons appear to try and knock the player out! Included in this week's game is a fun bit of animation code, where your Zonebot has a flying trail effect. This piece of code can be used in a variety of scenarios and games so be sure to add it to your backpack for future use

In addition to the Zonebot animation, our members also got stuck into this week's guided hack which added a big laser beam for Zonebot to avoid. By using some randomisation and broadcast code, our members were able to add a 1 in 10 chances of a canon turning into a super laser - how cool is that! Our coders also decided to change their super lasers into all sorts of things from pokeballs, to fruit pieces to footballs; there's no limit to their imagination

We've had some amazing hack ideas this evening - including high score trackers, lives systems and defence barriers.

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.

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.

Filed under club updates

Can you 'Dodge It'?

What a week in the clubs looks like

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