I super recommend to anyone, getting the Arduino starter kit, and going through the projects book. Most fun I'd had in ages + a great hands on way to begin to understand how electronics are not magic.
https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-multi-...
I just got my son the "30 days lost in space" inventr.io kit (not associated at all with them). It seems more pricey than your standard Arduino kit for sure, but provides a (pretty lame..) story of the why things are being built.
Point being, as his first (and close to my first) experience with breadboards and programming, he is loving it and having the programming aspect and electronics aspect combined into "this code makes this thing do this" makes it FAR more interesting for him. I doubt it'll be his passion in life (but who knows) but it's certainly helping him pay attention to details and he is certainly learning a good bit about designing some simple circuits. Would recommend.
(Unrelated, but he also got a build your own am/fm radio kit and he successfully soldered all the bits he needed to, having never soldered before and only ended up with one good burn on his hand at the last connection to be made, the negative battery!)
Confidence building things, and a great way of teaching "you can relatively do anything, you just have to practice!". You could see the pride when he flicked the switch and noise was made.
Same , slower, pride on every day he's "lost in space".
Also Raspberry Pi (the Coke to Arduino's Pepsi). More expensive (especially since hoarders have been bulk ordering them and jacking up the price), but IMO more flexible and powerful.
There are several others, but Arduino and Raspberry Pi seem to be the ones with the widest variety of "it just works" add-on components and programming tutorials.
