Microcontrollers, notably Arduinos (or PICs or BASIC stamps, etc.) are the modern-day equivalent of the Apple //e or IBM XT. I'd say go with the Arduino since it has the widest support in terms of kits, tutorials, ready availability and user community.
(On the historical front, people like David A. Lien (Level I BASIC manual) and Bob Albrecht (BASIC: A Self-Teaching Guide) deserve huge credit for their fine self-teaching/programmed texts for learning BASIC on vintage microcomputer and mainframe systems! Not to mention David Ahl, Creative Computing, BYTE, and all the other awesomeness of the microcomputer era. Back in the day, it was assumed that anyone who got a microcomputer, whoever they might be, would undoubtedly and inevitably learn to write programs for it!
Dive Into Python and its ilk are OK, but I have yet to see something that is nearly as good as the old self-instruction books on BASIC.
For that matter, even old-school books on 6502 and Z-80 assembly language (e.g. Lance Leventhal and William Barden, Jr.) were written clearly and with the assumption that anyone could learn!)