I want my kids to do the same but are really unclear as to how this is done today without BASIC. I am not psyched about tools that help you merely build platformers with WYSIWYG.
My kid (15 yo) keeps producing games in Python on his iPhone using Pythonista. Latest one is a Tetris clone with load/save game, music, animations on removing a line. I offer to help if he runs into problems but he prefers to hack away and learn on his own. Proud dad here :-)
How did you get your child to start programming? I had some success with Scratch, but it is not something my 9 year old would do for fun. (He likes 3D printing, but it is mostly just dragging stuff around.)
I mostly stayed hands-off and let him explore where he would. He really only got into programming more seriously the past couple years, so age 13 on, after we got him a gaming PC. He was playing various Roblox games, and decided he could write his own, so that got him started. He has his phone on bus rides to/from school, so he decided to play around in Python to pass the time. He's currently playing Space Engineers with some friends online, and they've all apparently decided the most fun for now is to learn C# for the internal scripting functionality that game provides.
> I mostly stayed hands-off and let him explore where he would.
I think this is the way.
Also quite similarly soon after VB, learned C# so I could make mods for RunUO, which was a reverse engineered server implementation for Ultima Online that people would run free game servers with. At that point I was pretty hooked, and tried making things like dragon eggs that would hatch over time and evolve and such. There's something about other people being able to experience your code in a virtual world and also the creative aspect that makes it somehow addicting.
But I'm not sure it was anything particular about the environment per se. Like, visual basic was written to do business software, truly the most boring thing imaginable. I think it's more about being left to your own devices with something that intrigues you for hours on end without an adult trying to control or direct what you're doing. Maybe. I'm not sure :-)
It's rough around the edges, but what it does well is offer a wide array of sensor inputs, and very simple text output. And wraps it in a simple API.
You can compute temperature, direction, orientation, do GPIO, network via Bluetooth or direct radio, and drive it with a simple two button and marquee text UI.
The V language also looked ideal for this as it has a built-in GUI but upon investigation I found its internals are... not really fleshed-out or thought-out well, and its main maintainer likes to delete and ban any criticisms regardless of validity on its official forums, so that was out, maybe revisit it in a few years