HALLOWEEN GAME JAM!

By The Code Zone team 1 min read

During October Half Tem we opened up our doors for yet another Game Jam!

During October Half Tem we opened up our doors for yet another Game Jam! After the success of the Summer ones, our children were fuelled and ready for another week of hacking!

Lots of fun (and learning) during the Halloween Game Jam in Modders! This group got their hands on 'Pro-Platformer' for the first time. This group had a blast combining all the Python concepts they've learned so far into this exciting new platformer featuring a tilemap based level that's just asking to be customised!

 

Play some of the games that have been shared from this Game Jam...

 

 

How a game jam works

  1. Six to eight weeks of club

    An hour a week, the same mentor, a group of no more than six. Over a term the pieces stack up: events, loops, variables, functions, and whatever else the thing they are building turns out to need.

  2. Then the holidays, and a theme

    We announce a theme and stop there. No brief, no worksheet, and no deadline you can fail. It is the one stretch of the year with an unbroken run at a single idea, which is why most of the building happens here rather than in the term.

  3. Then somebody else plays it

    Finished games go up on our own platform and on this page, where sharing between members is moderated by mentors. Other children play them and award XP. Having a stranger pick up the thing you made is the part that keeps children coming back.

The games our members made

5 games 5 makers 4 XP awarded by other members Built in MakeCode

Every one of these is playable in the browser, no account needed. Have a go at a few.

About our game jams

A game jam is a themed build: we announce a theme, and children across the Academy spend a few weeks making something from it. There is no brief beyond the theme and nothing to finish by a deadline you can fail. Children share what they made on our own platform, where chat and sharing between members is moderated by mentors.

Jams are included in Academy membership. They are the part of the Academy where everybody is working on the same thing at once, which for a self-paced course is worth having.

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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