January & the Winter Warriors badge
Our new years week is over and we're back into the swing of things. Here's an update of the last week from Tom, a round-up of last week and kicking things off this term with a new badge for you to get!
It's me, Tom, one of the mentors at the Code Zone. I'm the guy who pops up in all the videos on the site telling your child about the code they're about to sink their teeth into. A lot of the time, I made those projects as well, so any requests for a game, I'm the one to ask!
Hope you enjoyed the holidays! It's been great to be back with all the clubs and coding. Normally, I run a couple clubs in between making all the games. This week though, I've had the pleasure of being in some extra sessions and, boy oh boy, have there been some impressive projects.
Holly and I will always have a catch up about what people have got up to but seeing the end product is never quite the same as seeing the effort that goes into those games!
Watching the children solve problems, share ideas and have those eureka moments is really special and one of the highlights of my week
On the note of seeing the creative process in action, one of the best moments this week was the squid related hacking in one of the clubs.
After a brief tangent about the squid related mechanics of the popular Nintendo game "Splatoon", I set everyone in the club a custom hack challenge to incorporate an inky eight-legged sea creature into their game. I'm a SUCKER (get it? ) for weird and wonderful hack challenges like this!
COMING UP...
We have plenty in store for 2022. In fact, we have so many project ideas in the pipeline that it's been hard work figuring out where to start!
Next week there'll be plenty of new projects including, a "Coin Magnet" mechanic, a water ripple effect, and, of course, a new game featured as well.
This half term we have the Winter Warriors badge now available! Congratulations to those who got the New Years badge last week. This badge will be available until the 4th of Feb - I wonder if you can guess what our badge theme may be from then? (the date is a sneaky clue).
To earn stars for these badges, head to your dashboard, complete projects, let us know if you have made any mods, and join your mentor in a Hack club for even more stars and XP!
We'll see you in there!
Tom
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.
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.
