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I've got three projects underway for remote vacation house monitoring - garage door position; did somebody ring the doorbell; and is the furnace responding to a thermostat call for heat (I prefer to know early rather than when the thermostat is reporting the house is too cold). They are in various stages of bench prototyping right now and the first is almost ready to install.

Arduino is a SUPER platform for young people. There are numerous "getting started" books and you can buy all sorts of complete kits. If your kid is already into robotics, these might be too elementary for him. But there is no upper limit to what he can learn. If he has an aptitude and interest in this field, the Internet of Things and Robotics is a fantastic career track and you won't wind up being obsolete. In my opinion, you can't go wrong nudging him in this direction and supporting his interests.

Check Amazon Arduino Kit for Kids and you'll find a huge variety of kits. Here's one typical kit created around the Arduino Uno R3 which is the best platform to get started.

There are many online stores specializing in robotics and IoT. He can Google these to find their sites. What is really amazing these days is how inexpensive everything is. Not long ago the systems hobbyists are using cost a thousand times more than they do today.

Adafruit Industries
Sparkfun
IC Station
Tindie
DigiKey
Arduino Store
Element 14
Seeed Studio
Sunfounder
PHPoC
Circuit Specialists
Pololu Robotics and Electronics
Solarbotics
ElectroDragon

The field blends so many disciplines (embedded systems, micro controllers, electronics, software, object oriented programming, radio, telemetry, data management, control systems, mechanisms, motion control) that it is almost impossibly large. It is often labeled "Mechatronics" (aka mechatronic engineering) which is the multidisciplinary branch of engineering that focuses on the engineering of both electrical and mechanical systems, and also includes a combination of robotics, electronics, computer, telecommunications, systems, control, and product engineering.