What is Learning Through Play?
By Jaz - The Code Zone Mentor!
Children discover through world through play; even from when they are babies. It is an important part of any child's development and science has shown that children's brains actively and positively change through playing. Learning through play encourages children to be flexible and creative in their way of thinking - it avoids rigid ideas and introduces the ability to see the world from different perspectives.
There are five key skills that playing unlocks for children:
- Physical Skills: the ability to run, skip, jump, balance and learn their bodies.
- Social Skills: the power to work with other children to solve problems, come up with interesting ideas and learn the empathise with others.
- Emotional Skills: the space to feel happy, excited, frustrated and passionate within a safe environment.
- Cognitive Skills: the ideas created through strategies and problem solving.
- Creative Skills: the potential to have their own voices heard through stories, drawing and performance.
One of the most amazing things about Learning through play is that children actively enjoy it and seek it. Children can learn through play without even realising it because play is engaging, interactive and meaningful to children.
This is why we at The Code Zone believe that learning should ALWAYS be through play. We encourage play through the games we create and the clubs we build. Our clubs are child-led; meaning that all of our activities and instructions are things our club members actively ask and seek for.
By making our games accessible and fun, it makes the code we help your children write be accessible and fun to. In our clubs not only do your children get a sense of accomplishment from writing code, but they get to play and use the code afterwards in their games - meaning that play is throughout the entire process from start to finish.
Whether our young Game Dev Club developers are sharing their own creations with their mentors or our Minecraft Modders are modding code in a friend's Minecraft world - every aspect of The Code Zone surrounds the concept of play; the most important part of a child's development.
Who wrote this
We run coding clubs for children aged 6 to 16, so the guides here are written by the mentors who teach them rather than by a marketing team. Live online clubs are open to children anywhere in the UK, and our in-person clubs run across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.
A live club is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor.
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. More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join.
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. Nothing is forced, and staying put is a perfectly good outcome.
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 in 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society. Over 1,000 children are enrolled.
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.
