The Live Stream with Tom and Holly
Reverse Tower Defence?!
It's our last one before Christmas and the festive hats are out! Tom and Holly talk tower defence, and this week's game dev club challenge - building a reverse version of the game, where you are the runner!
About the live streams
The live streams were a mentor-led session anyone could watch: two of our mentors building a game from scratch, thinking out loud, getting stuck and unsticking themselves. Watching somebody debug is a surprisingly good way to learn, because the useful part of coding is rarely the bit that works first time.
The clubs themselves work the same way, only smaller. 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, and children build their own games rather than working through a set course.
Most children start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when they are ready, and levels move down as readily as up so the work always fits.
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 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, and step away and come back. In 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society.
The clubs run online across the UK and in person across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, and 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, and we were the global winner of the Xero Beautiful Business Fund for Upskilling For The Future in 2024.
Nothing about a session is performance. Children are not asked to demo to the group or explain themselves on cue, and a child who wants to spend the hour quietly rebuilding something that already works is doing exactly what the hour is for.
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.
