I've done lot of volunteering programming with children and also have an 11 year old. Three obvious options: Unity, Scratch and Python with PyGame.
Unity sounds like the best fit to me - some code but a lot of interface. Code Club has a series of Unity projects which form a good getting started series: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/collections/unity As a Python programmer myself I found it fine helping my other son with those.
My 11 year old makes lots of stuff on Scratch by himself and has lots of fun. Scratch has pretty much become the default coding platforms for that under-12 age group. There are lots of resources and it's very easy to get making games, but it's limited in various ways and I have reservations about how great an introduction it is to programming beyond the real basics like variables and loops. If your child was seven or eight I would recommend Scratch, but feel like an 11 year old would probably be better off starting with something else.
Python is another option because you can help there and PyGame is the obvious library to use. It's quite a bit of work for somebody new to Python to make anything that feels like a game, although not impossible (I've been making a flag guessing game with my 11 year old in Python but using Tkinter instead) so more delayed gratification is definitely needed. You'd probably have to help a lot and there are a lot of concepts to learn - just becoming confident in how things like lists, dictionaries and objects work takes some time at that age. There are some books that lead you through making games with Python and PyGame though - Mission Python and Python Hunting spring to mind, with the caveat that I haven't worked through all of either of them. I think most 11 year olds would struggle to work through those books by themselves though, but if you skim through them and use them as a road map for making a game together, then they could be worth a go.
Unity sounds like the best fit to me - some code but a lot of interface. Code Club has a series of Unity projects which form a good getting started series: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/collections/unity As a Python programmer myself I found it fine helping my other son with those.
My 11 year old makes lots of stuff on Scratch by himself and has lots of fun. Scratch has pretty much become the default coding platforms for that under-12 age group. There are lots of resources and it's very easy to get making games, but it's limited in various ways and I have reservations about how great an introduction it is to programming beyond the real basics like variables and loops. If your child was seven or eight I would recommend Scratch, but feel like an 11 year old would probably be better off starting with something else.
Python is another option because you can help there and PyGame is the obvious library to use. It's quite a bit of work for somebody new to Python to make anything that feels like a game, although not impossible (I've been making a flag guessing game with my 11 year old in Python but using Tkinter instead) so more delayed gratification is definitely needed. You'd probably have to help a lot and there are a lot of concepts to learn - just becoming confident in how things like lists, dictionaries and objects work takes some time at that age. There are some books that lead you through making games with Python and PyGame though - Mission Python and Python Hunting spring to mind, with the caveat that I haven't worked through all of either of them. I think most 11 year olds would struggle to work through those books by themselves though, but if you skim through them and use them as a road map for making a game together, then they could be worth a go.