For those interested Electronic/Electrical Engineering or a student interested in STEM, the perfect gift I think would be an Arduino Nano https://www.newark.com/arduino/a000005/dev-board-atmega328-arduino-nano/dp/13T9275?st=arduino%20nano . As this something that would help them get hand on experience with Hardware early..
The Arduino ecosystem is one of the best with a lot of community participation, which means if the Maker/Student is stuck/has a question, it would be super easy to 'google the answer and the answer is mostly in the first five results. In addition, most community website related to electronics will always have an Arduino section, here is link to element14's Arduino Conner- link , which makes it easy to keep updated with the Arduino ecosystem, and get inspired with interesting projects posted by other makers..
In addition, with the Nano I would also add a couple of LED's, 1K resistors, a potentiometer, buzzer, a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, breadboard, breadboarding wire and an OLED screen, if possible. This should help the student make at-least 7 to 8 project. And, finally make a real world project to display the temperature and humidity of their room on an OLED screen, which they can use every day..
In addition, once the student/maker gets used to coding with the Arduino IDE, I am sure it will pique their interest in using other boards like the Arduino MKR line up , or try some of the other ESP8266/ESP32 related boards..
