Code club updates - news from within our coding clubs

What has been happening across the clubs, written up by the mentors who were there. New levels, new challenges, children moving up, and the occasional thing that went sideways in an interesting way.

Our clubs run for one hour a week in groups of no more than six, with the same mentor every week, online across the UK and in person across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. Children build their own games rather than working through a set course, so no two weeks look quite the same and no two children are doing the same thing at the same time. These updates are where that shows.

They are also how we tell parents about changes without burying them in an email. New clubs opening, timetable changes around the school holidays, and anything else worth knowing if your child already comes to us.

A lot of what follows is game jams. We set a theme, announce it across the clubs, and children spend a few weeks building whatever it suggests to them - past themes have included Evolution, Elemental Powers and The Floor is Lava. There is no brief beyond the theme and nothing to finish by a deadline anybody can fail, which is why the entries range from a polished two-screen platformer to something genuinely strange that only makes sense to its author. Both get written up.

The weekly round-ups are the other half. A mentor picks out what happened in their sessions: a child who finally got collision detection working, a bug that took three weeks and turned out to be one character, someone moving up a level. They are short and they are specific, and they are the closest thing we have to showing you an ordinary hour rather than telling you about it.

If you are still deciding whether to join, the guides section is more useful: it covers what to ask any coding club, when a child is ready to move from Scratch to Python, and what works for autistic and ADHD children.

The Code Zone runs coding clubs for children aged 6 to 16. Live online clubs are open to children anywhere in the UK and our in-person clubs run across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.

A session is one hour a week in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor every week, and children build their own games rather than working through a set course. The first session is a free taster and we do not ask for card details, so you can see whether it suits your child before deciding anything.

Most children start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when they are ready. Levels move down as readily as up so the work always fits, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome.

Mentors write a note on every child after every session, which is how we know when somebody is ready to move on, 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.

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, scored by five independent judges on safeguarding, inclusivity and community impact.