I'm an electronics engineer who started to learn programming Assembler on PIC16 micro-controllers. My arguments is not against learning the fundamentals. I just

I'm an electronics engineer who started to learn programming Assembler on PIC16 micro-controllers. My arguments is not against learning the fundamentals. I just know from teaching that the primary problem people have when learning is that they get stuck and stop. Making GUIs in Python (given good educational resources, like a book) will give results much faster, and more quickly become a practical skillset for GUI programming and other useful tasks. For learning C and starting to poke at low-level embedded stuff I would recommend starting with Arduino (and then into plain AVR) - and not go anywhere near a GUI toolkit. There is a reason we don't actually throw kids into the deep end when teaching them to swim. Most of them would just drown...