What a week in our coding clubs actually looks like

This is the diary rather than the advice. Every post is written by the mentor who ran the session, usually the same evening, and it is the closest thing we have to letting you look through the window of a coding club for kids before you book anything.

Expect game jams with deliberately strange themes, Minecraft mods that should not work and somehow do, and weekly roundups of what children aged 6 to 16 built that week in Scratch, Python and TypeScript. Some weeks are a triumph.

Some weeks are four children quietly fixing the same bug for an hour, and we write those up too, because that is what learning to code actually looks like most of the time.

We keep it because it is the part parents believe. Anyone can claim small groups and patient mentors on a pricing page. It is harder to fake three years of Tuesday evenings, written up by the people who were in the room.

If you want the practical advice instead, the guides are the other half of the blog: what comes after Scratch, how to choose a club, and what actually works for autistic and ADHD children.

The Code Zone runs coding clubs for children aged 6 to 16. Live online clubs are open to children anywhere in the UK and our in-person clubs run across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.

A session is one hour a week in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor every week, and children build their own games rather than working through a set course. The first session is a free taster and we do not ask for card details, so you can see whether it suits your child before deciding anything.

Most children start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when they are ready. Levels move down as readily as up so the work always fits, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome.

Mentors write a note on every child after every session, which is how we know when somebody is ready to move on, and it is why a child who has gone quiet for three weeks does not simply go unnoticed.

More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join.

In 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society, and 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.