A while ago I bought 'Arduino' and 'PIC', they both provided a microcontroller and the cord that goes from your PC to the microcontroller so you can update the code in the chip etc. I tinkered a little bit with Arduino and you can build quite a few little well working things such as robots.

So, I would use Arduino. The coding part is a lot like C, which is good even for a MC with limited memory resources and processor.

I'm still a beginner in that area though.