Member Milestone: Our Longest Attending Coder Has Been A Member For Five Years!
We're super excited to tell you all about Matt, our first member to have achieved FIVE YEARS of coding related fun with us here at The Code Zone! Keep reading to find out more about Matt's incredible coding journey...
The Code Zone has many members, and they’ve been around for many varying amounts of time! We’re here to talk about one particular member though, one who has been with us for FIVE years… MATT!
Now this isn’t the first time we’ve talked about Matt here on The Code Zone, you might remember that a few weeks ago we talked about Matt’s entry to the BAFTA young game developer awards. (If you missed that you can check it out here!!) It turns out though that Matt was mere moments away from the excellent achievement of 5 years with The Code Zone!
When asked about the last 5 years, Matt had this to say:
'The Code Zone has been a fun and consistent base from which learning to code has been incredible, with endless creativity and great help from a selection of talented and friendly mentors. It has been amazing to learn to code and watch The Code Zone grow alongside me over these past five years, with a neverending stream of new and exciting features and games.'
Over the last few years Matt has gone through many MANY hours of coding and planning and made so many excellent games, physics demos, and more! We personally couldn’t be prouder to have Matt amongst our members, providing both excellent code, and also uplifting others in clubs by bouncing ideas around in the groups!
Want to see some of Matt's cool creations?
Keep an eye on our Facebook and Instagram pages for the rest of the week where we'll be showing off some of Matt's incredible games!
All this is to say: Well done on 5 years of coding Matt! We hope to see many more!
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.
