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.
