It was always one of my biggest challenges in school, trying to learn things that didn’t catch my interest. It’s sooooooooooooo much easier when your curiosity’s aroused.
The good thing is, most of the parts are so cheap, and somewhat hard to break. You can easily just take a leap of faith on most stuff (especially digital circuits) and just have a lot of fun.
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I’m glad I asked some questions, I had visions of smoke rising from the work bench 
and I really should know better. Put a fair amount of miles on motorcycles with electronic injection/ignition that ran sooooo much better than earlier bikes I had. Of course when the label said Bosch the parts were rarely cheap. 
If you are playing with a $5 microcontroller and $0.05 leds, the smoke is a cheap lesson.
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$5 I can handle, it’s the thought of accidentally frying something like a Rambo board that’s a bit daunting. Of course I really had no idea something termed a microcontroller could be had for $5, sounds like it could be fun.
This one is $6. But it has built in wifi and bluetooth:
This is a more basic board:
There are a bunch of caveats and stuff for using these, but you can find a bazzilion youtube videos about them and there are a million software packages for them. The esp32 and blynk is pretty slick and you can learn a ton of things with them. You certainly don’t want to break one every 5 mins. But breaking one per project is not going to kill the budget.
The first arduino I had that could connect to wifi was $100. It was not that long ago. The floor has dropped on these things. There are boards with build in accelerometers and gyros for quadcopters that cost about $20 and have 32bit chips. That was crazy a few years ago.
The rambo is different. That is made from high quality components and hopefully won’t break if you make one of the common mistakes. It also comes at a premium for the consistency.
I have to say the Rambo made me happy when it all just plugged in and worked from the start, things are a little more difficult when it’s all new to you, hard to tell sometimes if you’ve done something wrong or there’s a problem with a component. But as a one-time owner of a Commodore VIC-20 (ridiculous $$$ compared to today’s products) I can certainly appreciate how quickly electronic capabilities go up while the $$$ go down. That you can have things like gyros and accelerometers for so little cost is remarkable. Is there a modern day HeathKit equivalent? I still have my 50+ year old HeathKit Dwell-Tach that gets occasional use and still gets it done. 
Or an Archim 1.0a (see above). 
Speaking of which, is there any value in a fried board? Can smart people salvage bits from it or is it a decoration?
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I don’t know how it would be termed in the electronics world but I got a kick in the movie The World’s Fastest Indian, a true story by the way, that the gent obsessed with building the world’s fastest Indian had a few shelves in the shop littered with parts that had gone KERBLAMO! along with a sign reading “Offerings to the Gods of Speed”. Perhaps the Archim would be an offering to the Gods of Electrickery?
Not really. There are certainly good parts on it, but they are hard to remove and put into something else without hurting them. The most value would be to figure out what is broken and replace just that part.
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