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
About The Code Zone Academy
Posts like this one are written by the mentors, about what members have been building. The Game Dev Academy has no fixed session time: a new build goes up every week and a child opens it whenever they are ready, with a STEM-certified mentor answering by text and video message when they get stuck.
Children build their own games rather than following a set course, starting in Scratch. Levels move down as readily as up, and staying where you are is a perfectly good outcome. Every mentor is background-checked and STEM-certified.
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 the work actually looks like before you sign up to anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.
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