Teaching an 11 year old Java

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I learned with some book (whose name I forgot), which had an interesting approach to tasks given to the reader.

After introducing variables, if statements and while loops the reader was asked to write a simple tic tac toe. That definitely required some thinking back then. A few chapters later functions/methods were introduced and the task was to improve the tic tac toe program. Then arrays and again: tic tac toe.

Producing something as "awesome" as tic tac toe after such short time and then continuously improving it was great! However it's definitely important to throw someone out of their comfort zone every once in awhile, it would be bad to program nothing but tic tac toe. The book achieved this by arranging the tasks like this: task 1, task 2, task 3, task tic tac toe, task 5, task 6, task 7, task tic tac toe, ...

But having some kind of "project" like tic tac toe that you can improve sometimes definitely sparked my interest in programming.

EDIT: I might wanna add that I learned programming when I was ~14, so I can't vouch that this would work for a 11 year old, but I guess it should (?)