[shortercode]

I used to work on the Construct 3 game engine. It’s great for doing small games. You can do a lot by just dropping images in and adding “behaviours” like “platformer movement” and “solid”. Which is enough to build a simple platform game without any coding.

It scales pretty well from that, allowing you to build logic trees in a scratch like environment or go full code with JS.

Trial version is free, and browser based so no install. Loads of examples and demos in the editor to try as well.

[wormlord]

Construct 3 is great. I used to it to teach at a camp. I would recommend this over everything else in this thread. It has a low barrier to entry, with the option to learn JS a bit at a time as the kid's skills grow.