[TrackerFF]

I'm not joking, but some of those Lego robotics kits can work just fine for getting your feet wet. Yes, even if they are made for kids.

When I started out, it was with microcontrollers, breadboards, sensors, actuators. And even though it was in college, I do wish I had just played around with more high-level stuff first.

[datadrivenangel]

The lego mindstorms kits were great for this. Nice and modular for the hardware, but still real enough to teach you lessons like sometimes identical motors don't work the same way.

[neuronexmachina]

Although the Mindstorms line is discontinued, nowadays there's the Lego SPIKE Prime (it's marketed more towards classrooms). Like the Mindstorms EV3, you can program it with either a visual block language or MicroPython.

[aivarannamaa]

Also check out https://pybricks.com, which gives MicroPython support for more LEGO sets.

IMO https://pybricks.com/project/saving-lego-mindstorms/ is especially interesting.