News from the grown-up coding clubs at The Code Zone

We used to run clubs for adults as well as children, and this is the archive of that. Grown-ups who wanted to learn to code, often because their own child had started and they were tired of not following the conversation.

We are not running adult clubs at the moment. These posts are here because the material still stands up: what it is like to start from nothing as an adult, why the block-based tools are not beneath you, and how learning alongside your child works better than either of you expects.

What we do run is coding clubs for children aged 6 to 16, online across the UK and in person across the east of England. A session is one hour a week in a group of no more than six with the same background-checked, STEM-certified mentor, and children build their own games rather than working through a set course.

If you cannot code yourself and want to help anyway, the guides section has a piece on exactly that: the four questions that unstick almost any bug, with no technical knowledge required.

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.