Challenge and innovate
With Barclays Code Playground
Creative coding for confident learners.
This collection of projects blends storytelling, maths, and digital creativity. From building interactive adventures to exploring budgeting and safety, learners will develop practical skills while having fun. Whether you're a parent, teacher, or club leader, these activities are designed to inspire confident coders and thoughtful problem-solvers.
Railway route
Choose your Railway route by using ‘selection’. Find the best tracks to travel to boost your earnings, pick up passengers and visit landmarks.
Load our starter project here and code along with the video and workbook.
Water safety Code Playground
We’re coding with water safety in mind. Spot the dangers at the beach using broadcast messages and loops.
Load our starter project here and code along with the video and workbook.
Story part one: Name in lights
Start our story challenge by making your name shine. Animate your name with motion blocks, loops, and add some music for fun. Let's create something amazing.
Story part two: Look and feel
For part two, let's make your story look great. Change the backdrop, character looks, and sounds to make your story stand out.
Story part three: Rock, paper, scissors
In part three, we're playing rock, paper, scissors. Learn to use controls and triggers to make the game.
Story part four: Any old tune
Part four is all about music. Use broadcast messages to add tunes to your story. Let's finish your project with a musical touch.
Story part five: Final story
In the final part, create your own story by showing off what you've learnt.
Functional functions
Help the cat in its quest to catch the mouse. Learn to streamline your code with custom blocks for smarter solutions.
Monster multiplication
Create your own times tables tester. In this workbook you'll make a project to help improve your multiplication skills as well as your coding.
Prince and princess
We’re bringing magic and coding together. Using sequencing, we’ll learn how timing is everything, especially for this Princess and one very lucky frog.
Batter up
Let's knock this out of the park. Tap the space bar at the right time to hit the baseball. In this challenge we need you to first code our game to make this home-run score possible.
Halloween hunt
Here's our special halloween spook-tacular. In this project you'll need to code along to help the witch to find her bat.
Money catch
Control a dinosaur sprite to catch falling coins, earning or losing money for each successful catch. Students will learn how to use loops, conditional logic, and variables to program interactive gameplay.
Find your starter project here.
Blooming budget
Create a functioning garden centre and learn about wants, needs and how to budget. This project brings elements of maths and coding together, you'll use variables to track spend and if else statements to track items being bought.
Find your starter project here.
Money mission - bus edition
Code a moving bus that follows the mouse pointer along a road. This project develops key programming concepts, especially selection, variables, and sensing, while linking them to money choices in real life.
Find your starter project here.
Micro:bit introduction
A basic introduction to coding with the Micro:bit MakeCode editor. Then learn to code the Rock, Paper, Scissors game. Load the BBC Micro:bit platform and code along with the video and workbook.
Micro:bit Deck the halls
Using the micro: bit coding editor, we’ll code music blocks to change the notes and length of the tone, coding the popular Christmas carol, Deck the halls. Load the BBC Micro:bit platform and code along with the video and workbook.
Introduction to EduBlocks
EduBlocks is a free tool that helps anyone learn how to code with text-based languages like Python, using familiar block coding as used in Scratch. In this session where we’ll be using loops and functions to create a colourful spiral and be able to see what block coding looks like in Python coding language.
