I dunno how the modern stuff works, but you don't need to get much simpler or open or easy to work with than the original LEGO Mindstorms. My introduction to pr

I dunno how the modern stuff works, but you don't need to get much simpler or open or easy to work with than the original LEGO Mindstorms. My introduction to programming was BASIC -> PERL -> JavaScript, all on the family PC, and then C on on the Hitachi 8-bit processor in the LEGO RCX. LEGO was very good about providing resources and documentation for working with the Mindstorms hardware, and enough simple tools were built around that that a 10-year-old could get set up to, e.g., run a FORTH environment on the RCX using a PC as a terminal in half an afternoon for free. And then you get to build your own six-legged robot... I credit this exposure to 8-bit low-level programming at a young age for my easy experience in computer architecture and operating systems classes later on.