The Code Zone Member is BAFTA Young Game Designer Finalist
Over the last few years BAFTA have been running the Young Game Designers competition. This year one of our longest attending members, Matt, has entered into the concept category and has been announced as a finalist!
.webp)
BREAKING NEWS!
One of The Code Zone’s longest attending members, Matt, has been announced as one of the 2025 BAFTA Young Game Designer Finalists!
Over the last few years BAFTA have been running the Young Game Designers competition. This is a way to get young people into the gaming industry by showing off their talents and having the chance to meet with industry professionals to gain even further insight.
This is something we are super passionate about ourselves!
Matt has been attending The Code Zone for 5 years and during that time we’ve seen him work his way through our levelling system, earn LOADS of XP and certificates, and now he’s a finalist for a BAFTA! What an incredible journey!
We’re SUPER impressed and we’re so proud of all of his hard work!
Congratulations from all of us here at The Code Zone, and fingers crossed that you’ll bring home the victory in June!
Matthew’s game is called “Inky Void”, an excellent game idea about an astronaut trapped on a moon, armed only with a paintbrush. You can find out more about his fantastic original concept by going to the BAFTA Young Game Designers 2025 finalists and you can also learn more about the BAFTA Young Game Designers competition.
The results will be announced on June 18th and we’ve got everything crossed for a victory for Matthew!
About The Code Zone
We run coding clubs for children aged 6 to 16, 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.
We were the global winner of the Xero Beautiful Business Fund for Upskilling For The Future in 2024, and won the STEAM Educator category at the 2026 Full STEAM Ahead Awards. In 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society.
A live club is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor every 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. Our awards programme is STEM accredited.
More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join, which is part of why the Autism Inclusion Award matters to us more than the others. Children can keep the camera off, type instead of speaking, and take a break without it disrupting anyone.
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.
