My daughter is 11 and has been making simple games on Scratch.
There's a lot of assets (images, characters, backgrounds) already in the system. The sending signals and receiving signals wasn't intuitive for her at first, but now she's getting it pretty well.
I don't think she could/would have figured it out on her own yet. Her older sister is 14 and spent a lot of time learning Scratch last year, so she was able to help her over the hurdles (like signaling). The 14 year old was able to learn it on her own, though I did teach her some concepts like loops and variables at the very start.
+1. Scratch indeed is very flexible environment for that (even younger) age group.
Lots of interactive ideas could be easily implemented with already available assets (sprites, backgrounds, sounds), customized too. It's more tooled for platformers. There are many nice tutorials (loadable projects). Tons of books (we used 'Super skills. How to code').
The other day this 8yo even had to face first ever concurrency bug - the race condition. Alas there are no ready mutexes as such in Scratch, but we found a way to synchronize the execution.
At times I did feel that it'd be faster to just type the code, but the kid actually felt more in control doing all the needed coding with touch/mouse.
Also the projects/games are shareable, so friends can load that too.
There's a lot of assets (images, characters, backgrounds) already in the system. The sending signals and receiving signals wasn't intuitive for her at first, but now she's getting it pretty well.
I don't think she could/would have figured it out on her own yet. Her older sister is 14 and spent a lot of time learning Scratch last year, so she was able to help her over the hurdles (like signaling). The 14 year old was able to learn it on her own, though I did teach her some concepts like loops and variables at the very start.