It's Happening: Our School Club Starts After the Summer Holidays! 🚀

Back in July we reported on a really lovely conversation with the head teacher and wrote, cautiously: "Who knows, maybe there'll even be a club of our own soon." 😉 We can now delete that question mark: after the summer holidays, a game development club around Blocks Beyond The Stars starts at Kurfürst-Balduin-Realschule Plus Trier, KuBa West. All the details now live on a page of their own: blocksbeyondthestars.com/ag

Who is it for? Pupils of all year groups. And the most important part first, because it's the most common worry: you need to know nothing at all. No programming, no game development, no AI knowledge. Curiosity is enough. Someone who would rather draw than type belongs there just as much as the kid who already builds worlds of their own.

So what do we actually do? We work together on a real game — not on a practice exercise. On the plan: inventing missions and worlds, designing spaceships and buildings, working creatively with AI tools, testing new versions and giving honest feedback. And then the part we look forward to most: the group decides together which ideas actually make it into the game. Not every session looks the same — sometimes we play and test, sometimes we draw, plan and argue it out. And we always finish by looking at what came out of it together.

Ideas you can find again later. Blocks Beyond The Stars is open source and public. So if a creature, a block or a mission is born in the club and we build it, it ends up in the real game that anyone in the world can download. Anonymously if preferred — or, with parental consent, credited in the game by first name. For a child that's a pretty powerful feeling: "that animal in there was my idea."

What you need: nothing. Taking part is free, the school provides the devices, nothing has to be installed at home, and nobody needs a personal account with any personal data. Everyone plays together in a supervised multiplayer environment — not somewhere out on the open internet, but in our own, watched-over worlds. (How that supervision works technically is described in our post about observer mode.)

Signing up. The registration form is on the club page, ready to download. Print it, fill it in, have a parent sign it — then hand it in at the school office or straight to us. Questions are welcome any time at info@blocksbeyondthestars.de. The club is run by the two of us, Marcel and Verena Dütscher.

One honest note about the schedule. The weekday, time and room aren't finalised yet — we're coordinating that with the school right now. As soon as it's fixed, it goes on the club page. Which is also why our posters and flyers deliberately carry no dates, just a pointer to that page: no notice board turns into waste paper because a time slot moved. 📌

Honestly, we're rather excited. This project started as a family thing — a father, a son and an idea. That it's now turning into a club where other children can put their own ideas into a real game is more than we pictured at the start. We can't wait to meet everyone joining after the holidays. See you out there among the stars! 🌟