The BBC has launched a “digital maker kit” for children to create their own games, as a spin-off from its CBBC channel’s Technobabble show.

Available from the CBBC website, the Make It: Technobabble tool works on smartphones and tablets as well as computers and can be used to create platform, racing and Flappy Bird-style action games, among other genres.

Children can edit the rules, physics and background of their games, using assets including imagery based on the hosts and animations in the show.

“It’s a starter kit. It requires no technical knowledge, no download and works just as well on mobile and tablets as desktop,” wrote BBC Future Media’s head of digital creativity Martin Wilson in a blog post.

“The only requirements are access to the web, a willingness to experiment and an idea. In minutes a child can create a game.”

The BBC has been testing a prototype version of the tool during its CBBC Roadshow events in Gateshead and Birmingham, with Wilson saying that the broadcaster was surprised at how quickly children picked it up

“Young children were producing games even the developers hadn’t considered. It’s wonderful to see how children were willing to have a go, try again if it didn’t work, share their creations with friends and collaborate to make better games.”

Make It: Technobabble is not a programming tool, but Wilson wrote that the BBC hopes it will encourage children’s skills in “collaboration, experimentation, computational thinking, confidence” as a precursor to them learning “higher order skills” like coding.

“The underlying technology enables us quickly to make changes and add new features, allowing us to easily explore ways we might expand this component-based system into to other areas in future, and potentially with other BBC brands,” he wrote.

The tool is part of the BBC’s wider Make It Digital scheme, which will be the broadcaster’s key education project in 2015, following its focus on the first world war in 2014.

The new initiative has already kicked off, including a web game based on Doctor Who – The Doctor and the Dalek – which launched in October as a way for 6-12 year-olds to play, but also practise some early programming skills.

“This is about have-a-go digital literacy: making, creating. It’s not all just about programming: it might be having a go at a robotics challenge, or 3D printing, or experimenting with digital design or animation,” the BBC’s head of strategic delivery Kerensa Jennings told the Guardian at the time.

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