The Spring Game Jam is HERE!
May Half Term means a brand new Game Jam with a brand new theme! Ready to get playing?
The Spring Game Jam 2024 is set to launch on May 24th and will run all the way until June 7th so it’s almost time to saddle up and start coding - we’ll see you there!
Howdy y’all!
With half term almost upon us, that means it’s also time for another Game Jam here at The Code Zone! If you’ve never heard of the Game Jam before then let us catch you up to speed; we give you a theme and a blank project and you make your own rootin’ tootin’ game that fits the theme.
The Game Jam is free to all - so no matter what your coding ability is, our mentors will be here to assist. We love creativity here, so there are endless possibilities when it comes to interpreting the theme!
Past themes have included; “Don’t Go Outside”, “Elemental Powers”, and “Robot Rivals” so this ain’t our first rodeo! Our coders always give us a range of different games, sometimes they get a bit spooky, sometimes they’re hilariously funny, and they’re always really fun to play - check out our previous blog posts to see what we’ve been up to in past jams.
While we aren’t quite ready to reveal the upcoming theme, there are some clues hidden in this blog post if you want to start thinking about your game ideas early. Interested in taking part? Then keep an eye on the Game Jam tab on the dashboard for updates! We’ll also keep you in the loop on our social media pages.
The Spring Game Jam 2024 is set to launch on May 24th and will run all the way until June 7th so it’s almost time to saddle up and start coding - we’ll see you there!
Click here to login/sign up and join the game jam!
We'd love to hear from you too! Leave us a comment on Facebook - what did you think of our launch video?
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.
