April Fools at The Code Zone!

We take coding seriously and almost nothing else, and April the first is when that shows. These are the pranks, the deliberately broken builds and the announcements nobody should have believed but several people did.

There is a point to it beyond the giggling. A club where the mentors are visibly willing to look daft is a club where a child is more willing to try something that might not work, and trying things that might not work is most of what learning to code consists of.

The children who get the most out of our clubs are usually the ones who worked out early that they were allowed to make something ridiculous.

Our clubs run for one hour a week in groups of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor every week. Children build their own games rather than working through a set course, which is what leaves room for this sort of thing in the first place.

The Code Zone teaches children aged 6 to 16 to code by building their own games. Outside the UK that is the Game Dev Academy, which is self-paced: there is no fixed session time, so a child works at whatever hour suits them in any time zone.

A STEM-certified, background-checked mentor answers by text and video message during the week, so nobody is left on their own with it, and children build their own games rather than working through a set course. Creating an account is free and takes no card details, so you can see the platform before deciding anything.

Children start in Scratch, and the mentor sets harder work as soon as they are ready for it. 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, 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, the UK's leading autism charity, 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.