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For an 8 year old, definitely Scratch.

For slightly older kids or anyone who's taken geometry I'll throw Racket (a Scheme dialect) out there — it's a functional language built specifically for learning, the course How To Design Programs uses it and is pretty accessible and specifically has libraries that are used for drawing, coloring, and animating images in a very beginner friendly, digestible way

Look for Scratch solutions. Once they've got a handle on this there's a number of toys and things that use it. Lego mindstorms, star wars force sensor toys, crap like that.

Scratch! Very simple and easy to learn, perfect for teaching kids the basics of programming. Then you can go into the more advanced stuff

I would look at 2d engines 3d makes everything more complicated

Godot is the only proper game engine that's libre that I'd recommend but it's probably too much for an 8y/o. I liked plantsrstillcool's suggestion of using something really simple. Another similar thing might be mcreator for minecraft. It's not foss (it is free) but they understand their audience is kids and the devs generally make appropriate in concern for their target audience. It has the advantage of integrating with an already really popular game.

Would gamemaker studio be fine? Not libre though

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Alice is a game engine provided for free by Carnegie Mellon University & the National Science Foundation. I believe Oracle is also onboard since it's largely java-based. It's designed for middle school students to make games and have transferrable knowledge into Java, a pretty decent starting language. It's largely drag and drop in much the same way as Unreal or Unity can be these days, so that's definitely transferrable as well.

I think Alice is one of the more satisfying game engines for kids to learn in, since it's 3d, has a large library of premade assets, and feels like you're actually doing it instead of just sort of telling it what to do and having it do it for you.

Javascript/canvas? It's easily transferable, libre, and easy to distribute whatever she makes to her friends. Downside is that all the tutorials make it more complicated than...

// Treat this part as a magic incantation for now.
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => {
  let canvas = document.createElement("canvas");
  canvas.width = 256; canvas.height = 256;
  document.body.append(canvas);
  let ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
  let keys = {};
  document.addEventListener("keydown", function(e) { keys[e.key] = true; });
  document.addEventListener("keyup", function(e) { keys[e.key] = false; });
  // Initialization code here
  let x = 128;
  let y = 128;
  // End initialization
  setInterval(() => {
    // Game step code here
    if (keys.ArrowLeft) { x -= 2; }
    if (keys.ArrowRight) { x += 2; }
    if (keys.ArrowUp) { y -= 2; }
    if (keys.ArrowDown) { y += 2; }
    ctx.fillStyle = "#000";
    ctx.fillRect(0, 0, 256, 256);
    ctx.fillStyle = "#F00";
    ctx.fillRect(x, y, 16, 16);
  }, 16);
});

Just chuck that into an empty HTML page and you should be good to go.

You could try showing her Bitsy!

https://ledoux.itch.io/bitsy

It's a very simple game maker that does the behind the scene stuff for you. You still make little pixel art and dialogue and layout the game. There are a lot of people who do some really creative things with it. I can share a few of my favorites if you're interested

aren't roblox games coded in LUA lol?? how is that non-transferable

Here's a browser-based teaching tool for python UI:

https://py2.codeskulptor.org/

If you look through the demos you can probably find something that would interest her and try to reimplement it or modify it.

I remember in school they taught us to "program" a tic-tac-toe game in EXCELL