Three more sleeps: our school club starts on Wednesday! 🎒🚀

We announced it here in July, and now it is really happening: on Wednesday, September 2, our game-development club at KuBa West has its first afternoon. Between "wouldn't that be something" and "Wednesday it begins" lay a conversation with the head teacher, a concept paper, a stack of worksheets, a rollup banner — and quite a few evenings at the kitchen table. And now? Now, honestly, we are pretty nervous. 😅

The dress rehearsal already happened. Last Wednesday I got to present the club in the three sixth-grade classes at KuBa West — and the interest was really big! It is a special feeling to stand in front of a class and tell them that we will be building on a real game together — one that anyone in the world can download.

Preparation, part 1: the computer room. After the class presentations I went straight on to the school's computer room: to see what works how there — and how we get the game up and running. I work in IT myself, but the challenges a teacher faces who runs a school's IT on the side honestly shook me a little. All the nicer how the story ends: thanks to a remarkably dedicated teacher and to the super friendly, cooperative people responsible for the school's operating systems, one pleasant phone call later almost every problem was out of the world. 😉 Almost — one thing is still open: we don't yet know whether the body guarding the school's firewall will allow access to GitHub from the computer room. GitHub, of all things — the platform where millions of people (and our game) build software in the open. Why that would be blocked at a school is something I, as an IT professional, honestly cannot wrap my head around. We'll keep at it.

Preparation, part 2: the kitchen table. At home we thought about everything a good club needs — and quite a bit of it went straight into the game. We reworked the build editors so that later in the club we can design buildings and ships with them. We built a tool that lets us introduce kids to AI safely — a moderated chat where nothing goes through without approval. And on top of that there is an intro presentation and a one-page overview of the game controls.

Sign-ups are still open — for the older students too. A poster now hangs in the school, and registration forms are waiting in the school office. They are explicitly not just for the sixth grades: the club is open to students of all grades. If you would rather read up first — all the info and the form to download are on our club page, as always.

And what happens on that first Wednesday? No lecturing, promise. We start with the part that is the most fun: playing together — and then saying honestly what was good and what was not. Because that is the heart of this club: giving feedback, developing ideas, and experiencing that your own opinion can change a real game. Whatever comes after that, the group decides together.

Three more sleeps. We have stage fright — the good kind. See you Wednesday! 🌟

Justus, Verena and Marcel