Game Jam: Mascot Mayhem
Exciting news everyone! It’s still the summer holidays so here at The Code Zone we’re launching our second summer Game Jam!
Exciting news everyone! It’s still the summer holidays so here at The Code Zone we’re launching our second summer Game Jam!
Here’s how it works: we give you a theme, and it’s your job to make a game or animation based on that theme. Earlier this month we had such a great time with this summer’s first Jam (where the theme was ‘Honey I Shrunk The Code Zone’) and we saw loads of unique and exciting games.
After all of that excitement, we finally got all of the mentors back to their normal size and they’re ready for a brand new challenge!
The next Game Jam launches on August 19th and will be running for 2 weeks. It’s free for all to join, and those who are signed up to our live online clubs will also have an opportunity to work on their Jam in the club where their mentor will be on hand to help with any big coding questions.
Once completed, our coders can also share their project to the Game Jam tab on the dashboard so that other members of The Code Zone can play their game and give them XP!
We know that some of our ambitious coders like to plan ahead so that they can immediately get stuck into their projects, so without further ado the theme for the next Game Jam is…
Mascot Mayhem!
Check out the official Game Jam video for more information and follow mentor Nick’s adventure into the coding void to help Zonebot and those pesky mascots!
We’ll see you for the Game Jam on August 19th, happy coding!
About our game jams
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. Children share what they made on our own platform, where chat and sharing between members is moderated by mentors.
Jams run alongside the ordinary weekly clubs rather than instead of them. A Game Dev Club session is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor each week.
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.
Past themes have included Evolution, Elemental Powers, The Wall of Doom and Strange Sports, and the results range from a 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.
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, so the work always fits.
More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join, and in 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society.
Children can keep the camera off, type instead of speaking rather than being put on the spot, take a break without it disrupting anyone, and step away and come back.
Jams tend to be where that matters most: a deadline nobody set and a theme nobody has to interpret the same way is a much easier place to take a risk than a classroom is.
Live clubs run online across the UK and in person across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. Over 1,000 children are enrolled. 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.
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.
