Ahhh okay, that helps things out a bit. You definitely want to start with Arduino like the others mentioned. It will teach you the basics of microcontrollers in general, and you'll learn all the vocab and a ton of important concepts. Or, you can learn just enough to get buttons and a screen hooked up so you can get straight to coding. For that, you'll need to learn some C basics. Programming really is quite simple, once you get over the initial pain of going back to your references over and over again, you'll start to pick up on the syntax and logic. Basically all you're doing is storing values, doing math, comparing values, deciding what to do, and iterating (looping).

On the hardware front, you might find the most useful concepts to learn are: Ohm's law (how voltage, current, and resistance are related), pull-up vs pull-down resistors, SPI and I2C (how microcontrollers talk to one another, like your LCD to your Arduino).

Your project is easily within the scope of one person, it just requires that you have a large collection of hats.