Coding Games Workshop

Our Coding Games Workshop teaches the basics of coding and game development. We’ll teach coding fundamentals with a very practical workshop, giving pupils plenty of hands-on time with code, creating arcade-style games and “snack” games. We will then work on a REAL mobile game with your class, uploading the game to the app stores so the pupils can show off to their family and friends when they get home!

Our Coding Games Workshop is broken down into two sessions and can be run as a full-day or half-day workshop, depending on the depth of content you’d like us to cover.

We’ll begin by creating several arcade-style games with your pupils, replicating some of their favourite types of games, in code.

Using either Microsoft’s MakeCode programming language with Primary School/early Secondary School students, or optionally GameMaker Studio with older secondary school students, they’ll get to design their own artwork and characters and, throughout the session, they’ll learn how to move objects, change their size and rotation, and detect collisions (the building blocks of almost every game!), and we learn how to code if and while statements that make games work.

Your students will love seeing their ideas come to life, and they’ll be able to save and continue working on their projects in the future.

Throughout the session, the games we will create with your students will get more complex, as we introduce more advanced coding concepts. For schools booking a full-day workshop, they’ll even have the chance to produce a side-scrolling platform game!

Our Coding Games Workshop is extremely practical – we want pupils to get hands on with code, and experiment!

During the final section of each workshop, we look at a real game on the app-stores which we’ve deliberately broken. Using the skills the pupils have picked up throughout the first two parts of the workshop, they will work together to help us fix the game and adding new code to the game in the form of a new power-up! We always approach this as a group activity. Pupils get to write real code, with suggestions and support from their friends. This gives every pupil confidence and support, and a real sense of achievement and teamwork as they learn real world coding skills.

After the session, we then publish the group’s additions and changes to the app stores so they can show off to their family and friends when they get home! We even list the school’s name in the credits!

Each school that books a coding workshop with us receives the source code for the projects we created throughout the day, allowing them to continue working on the game once we have left, introducing their own ideas and taking the projects in new directions (we’ll set some additional challenges too!). We can also offer follow-up sessions and support materials.

In addition to providing you with follow-up lesson plans, and the source code for projects we create during our workshops, we can also provide Skype-based follow-up support, which is a super-cool and fun way for your pupils to stay engaged with coding and a great way for us to check-in and see how your pupils are doing and help them take coding further!

We run our Coding Games Workshop with pupils from Year 3 Primary School classes, right the way up to GCSE Secondary School classes. We code in JavaScript and C# which are real-world programming languages used for games development which gives pupils a real advantage when it comes to Computer Science and Computer Skills.