Holiday and half-term Game Jam updates!

A game jam is a themed build. We announce a theme, and children across the clubs spend a few weeks making something from it. There is no brief beyond the theme and nothing to finish by a deadline you can fail.

Past themes have included Evolution, Elemental Powers, The Wall of Doom and Strange Sports, and the results range from a polished two-screen platformer to something genuinely strange that only makes sense to its author. Both count. A jam is the one point in the year where the brief is deliberately loose, which is when children who normally follow instructions carefully surprise everybody.

Jams run around the school holidays and half terms, alongside the ordinary weekly clubs rather than instead of them, and taking part is optional and included with every membership. Children share what they have made on our own platform, where chat and sharing between members is moderated by mentors.

These posts are the roundups: what the theme was, what got built, and which ideas nobody saw coming. If your child is not a member yet, the first session is a free taster and we do not ask for card details.

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.