Weekly Round-up from Tom!
Diving into what's been happening in the week @ The Code Zone!
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Hello!
Tom here. Hope you're doing well!
After pouring my heart and soul into some skiing and curling physics for the Winter Olympics challenges, this week's project saw some classic dodging mechanics in this sci-fi spectacular. Crystal Catastrophe, as it's called, seems to have been a real hit!
For all the theming that goes into a game though, I love it when we see a game get a complete makeover. Jaikrish replaced his crystals with exploding skittles and gave his version the much more apt name "Skittle Catastrophe In Smiley-face Land". The enemy had some exciting new attacks as well which really kept me on my toes when I had a go.
Brewster also came up with a brilliant use of a CyberPi, in one of the physical clubs, using its motion sensing to make it a controller in a boxing game. It's probably one of the coolest and most creative uses of some hardware I've seen in a while and made me very nostalgic for Wii Sports Boxing, no matter how clunky it use to be!
With March just around the corner, we're finally starting to get into Spring and with that has come the new Spring badge. Your child can just hop on, tackle some projects and earn XP.
As always, shout if you need us.
Take care, Tom
What a week in the clubs looks like
Posts like this one are what actually happens in a session, written by the mentors who ran it. A Game Dev Club session is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same mentor every week, online or at one of our in-person clubs.
That cap is deliberate: it is what makes it possible for a mentor to notice when a child has gone quiet, or has rebuilt the same game four weeks running because they are avoiding something harder.
Children build their own games rather than working through a set course. Levels move down as readily as up, so the work always fits, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome. Every mentor is DBS-checked and STEM-certified.
Most children start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when they are ready. Mentors write a note on every child after every session, which is how we know when somebody is ready to move up, 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. Children can keep the camera off, type instead of speaking, take a break without it disrupting anyone, and step away and come back.
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.
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.
