just found out about the commander x16, which is a project to make an 8-bit computer close to the commodore 64 but made with all modern parts (so it doesn't rely on used or new-old-stock components), for hopefully less than $100, and I have to say we would enjoy playing with one of those
something that lets you work close to the hardware sounds fun in a way that modern computers... aren't
coding in C or Python or what-have-you is fine and all but being able to poke directly at memory and see results immediately sounds really good? an entire computer system simple enough for a single person to understand how every part of it works, which is an alien concept to us, who were born in 1994 and thus missed the era of the C64 and other 8-bit machines
...disappointingly the main resource for information and updates on the CX16 project appears to be a facebook group and well. we don't have an account there and certainly don't want one
the guy who's heading the project has posted a few videos explaining it on his youtube channel though ("the 8-bit guy")
the closest thing to the C64 experience that we had was learning how to program on a TI-84+SE graphing calculator, which while nice, only really supports TI-BASIC-83, which is a really, really bad dialect of BASIC
It was possible to run programs written in assembly but you couldn't write them on the calculator itself, you had to write them on a computer in an IDE then load them into the calculator which was too complicated for 10-year-old us to learn how to do
of note: basically all of this was fixed in ti-basic-89 that was used on the ti-89 calculators. Though the awkward typing was still there unless you had a v200