Global Innovation Tool: Arduino 

Arduino is a computer hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures microcontroller kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control objects in the physical world. The project's products are distributed as open-source hardware and software, which are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL), permitting the manufacture of Arduino boards and software distribution by anyone. Arduino boards are available commercially in preassembled form, or as do-it-yourself kits.

The project's board designs use a variety of microprocessors and controllers. These systems provide sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards ("shields") and other circuits. The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, for loading programs from personal computers. The microcontrollers are mainly programmed using a dialect of features from the programming languages C and C++. In addition to using traditional compiler toolchains, the Arduino project provides an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Processing language project.

Arduino is easy to use (knowledge from your high school Physics is enough). There are a lot of online resources available for you to use in your projcts. Let's start from the following modules: 

Electronics Refresher
Arduino Overview
Introduction to Arduino
DC Motors for Arduino
Stepper Motors for Arduino
Arduino Communication
Arduino Bluetooth RCV