What We Got Up To at Norwich Games Festival!
Earlier this week a few of our fantastic mentors travelled over to Norwich Game Festival for an awesome day full of coding! Here's what we got up to...
Earlier this week a few of our fantastic mentors left The Code Zone HQ and travelled over to Norwich Game Festival for an awesome day full of coding! We had an amazing time, and met loads of brilliant coders, so we’re here to tell you all about what we got up to.
In our Norwich sessions, our coders and gamers were introduced to the world of Augmented Reality!
What is Augmented Reality, you may be asking? It’s a unique experience that overlays digital content onto the real world. This means that coders were able to meet our virtual robot, Rob, and interact with it by building code.
Rob was able to carry out tasks, solve puzzles, and traverse the world through the power of AR!
For those that wanted something more physical, we also brought our coding robot Codey along.
Codey is a super cute panda-like robot (well...it could be a cat - there's a great debate rumbling with the children!), and through the power of programming it can drive around or even be used as a controller to play games and even sumo wrestle!
After our sessions, Paul and Ashley watched presentations by local games studios Moss Monkey Games and Fairer Games, learning what a power house of game dev talent there is in Norwich.
It was really exciting to meet locals and discuss what The Code Zone could be up to in Norfolk to support the Game Dev community. (watch this space!)
Thank you to Norwich Games Festival for having us, we had an amazing time!
It was great meeting new coding and gaming fans, and we were so impressed with all of their incredible new coding ideas.
If you want to code with Rob and Codey but didn’t manage to make it down to the festival, never fear!
You can hack, mod, and explore AR in our in-person clubs based in and around Cambridgeshire, or join us online for some Game Dev fun!
Click here to find a club near you!
About The Code Zone Academy
Posts like this one are written by the mentors, about what members have been building. The Game Dev Academy has no fixed session time: a new build goes up every week and a child opens it whenever they are ready, with a STEM-certified mentor answering by text and video message when they get stuck.
Children build their own games rather than following a set course, starting in Scratch. Levels move down as readily as up, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome. Every mentor is background-checked and STEM-certified.
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 the work actually looks like before you sign up to anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.
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