Fun and Friendship - How our clubs support children’s mental health!
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week, and so here at The Code Zone we wanted to draw attention to some of the ways both our excellent mentors and club members support each other, to create a positive environment for coding.
Coding is often unfairly seen as an activity restricted to dark, dingy basements where the only noises you’d hear are keyboards clacking and speakers crackling, far from friendly day-to-day conversation! But at The Code Zone we work hard to change this perception, which is why encouraging and building the mental health of our members is so important to us.
Coding is fun, valuable, and doesn’t have to be all silence and reclusiveness – in fact, we build friendship and communication into our clubs as a primary feature!
Especially in an age of increasing connectivity but lack of real social connection, our clubs are a great breath of fresh air. How, you may ask? Well, read all about it below!
Mentor Support
One of the best ways our clubs support the mental health of our members is through our amazing mentors. Each of our mentors has been expertly trained in all the aspects needed to deliver not only fun and learning in our clubs, but also support for each and every child.
This doesn’t just mean coding support (as much as we love to do that!) but also supporting their confidence, acting as positive role models, and ensuring their wellbeing.
Our mentors are always sure to congratulate members on their achievements and also reassure them when they make mistakes, helping them find solutions – after all, failure is the mother of success!
We believe it is exceptionally important to create an environment where children learn through fun, and don’t feel the excess pressure of assessments that can make them distressed, anxious, and lacking in confidence. Additionally, our mentors have all been specially trained in child online safety, to ensure they can always be a trusted adult for children to turn to if they feel upset or scared.
Member Support
Yes, you read that right; even our members have a part to play in strengthening mental health here at The Code Zone! We’re delighted to say that we have heaps of amazing members, from all sorts of backgrounds, who help make our clubs as supportive as they are.
For instance, at the end of all our clubs we offer a chance for kids to show off their games to each other – and like clockwork, they offer each other applause, compliments, and praise!
This always warms our hearts to see and is a great example of how children build friendships and genuine connections with each other in our clubs.
Kids incorporate recurring characters from their fellow members’ games, chat about their creative designs, and even offer each other coding help at times – maybe one day some of them will be mentors themselves!
The clubs may be remote, but it feels like you’re there coding together – and we wouldn’t have it any other way! The connections made with members and mentors are genuine and supportive, making our clubs a much needed oasis in an internet of dry detachedness.
Who wrote this
We run coding clubs for children aged 6 to 16, so the guides here are written by the mentors who teach them rather than by a marketing team. Live online clubs are open to children anywhere in the UK, and our in-person clubs run across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.
A live club is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor.
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. More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join.
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. Nothing is forced, and staying put is a perfectly good outcome.
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, and in 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society. Over 1,000 children are enrolled.
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.
