Take a look at mbed (http://mbed.org). It is designed for very rapid development (12/13 year olds were the test subjects, I think) and so abstracts a lot of the very hard stuff - but shows the basic concepts of microcontrollers. It has the benefit of allowing physical things to be controlled, like flashing lights.
Whatever happened to the expansion ports on home micros that provided full access to the microprocessor's bus? The BeBox's geek port was such a good idea...
Whatever happened to the expansion ports on home micros that provided full access to the microprocessor's bus? The BeBox's geek port was such a good idea...