Colour Run

By The Code Zone team 13 August 2023 2 min read

We are back in Game Dev Club and this week our hackers are playing 'Colour Run'.

A fun brain teaser mixed with some hand-eye coordinator; the player has to get their coloured sphere through the obstacles by matching its colour with the corresponding one. If the sphere hits a different colour to its own, it's game-over and the player has to start all over again.

The player gains points the further they move along the screen and the more obstacles they manage to get through. So... it was only natural that even before we tackled the Guided Hack that we did a quick hack our own: A High Score Mechanic! By creating a variable called 'High Score' and using some comparison logic code to check whether the High Score was higher than the current Score, our hackers were able to keep track of their best score and have their own mini tournament of Colour Run

After having some competitive matches, we moved onto our Guided Hack which was another one of our favourite mechanics in video-games: power-ups. We created a new sprite which would active our power-up - this time, should the sphere manage to touch the power-up sprite, it would create a rainbow effect which would allow the sphere to pass through any colour rather than its associated one. This made our high score mini tournament even more fun, especially when we had members modifying the code to make the power-up sprite appear more frequently on the screen!

We also had a quick look at some of the Game Jam entries that our members have been working on - there is still a few days left to finish your entry and we can't wait to see what everyone comes up with for our Element Powers Game Jam! https://thecode.zone/dashboard/gamejam

Happy gaming and see you next week!

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.

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Colour Run

What a week in the clubs looks like

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