I genuinely can't wait for the kids in my family to be old enough to expose them to this ( I will admit that it will be a great excuse for me to play with it as well ).
I don't know if I'm a bit younger than most on here (late twenties), but my parents got me into Lego Mindstorms quite young. I was 8 when they bought me the the Robotics Invention System 2.0 set. For those that remember, it was the yellow RCX brick based on the Renesas H8/300. That single gift basically kicked off my entire interest (and later career) in computing. The hacker community surrounding them was _insane_.
I got really tired of the block based programming after a few weeks. My first "text" programming language was NQC ("not quite C") for the RCX, which was a C-like language that ran on top of the standard lego firmware. My first experience with proper C was legOS/brickOS, a toolchain to write software for the RCX with GCC. My first experience with Java was leJOS, which managed to fit a functional Java VM into the 32 KiB of RAM of the RCX. My first experience with Linux was because both of these tools functioned better there (except leJOS for NXT, bluetooth downloads always caused me trouble).
My dad kind of regretted it when his 10 year old built the disk launcher from the ultimate builder's set and hooked it up to the mindstorms vision command set to make a disk launcher that fired at anyone entering the basement...
So, Mindstorms introduced me to programming, then Linux, C, and Java.
Similar story in my case. I got into electronics generally with one of those Radioshack 200-in-one sets I got for Christmas. I actually requested the RIS 2.0 set myself, must have found out about it through a catalog. I was fortunate in that my birthday falls very close to Christmas, because I got basically nothing else that year. These sets were (and are) expensive for working class families.
I was always vaguely aware that you could "go deeper" with the RCX, with real programming languages and so on, but I never did so myself. I don't think the Lego company put much effort into introducing kids to these advanced features at the time - you had to know about it and have access to a community that could teach you things, and at that age I had no computer and we had dial-up internet anyway. So I stuck with the basic stuff.
I think that's actually an indication of the direction Lego is taking with this, unfortunately. It looks like the set is designed around 5 different robot designs you can build, rather than being open ended. I think this makes advertising easy, because a kid who sees the ad can say "I want to play with that robot", whereas an entirely open-ended set has less appeal. But not being forced to be creative turns these sets into novelties which kids will put aside after they've built each of the robots once. They've made the programmable blocks more "friendly" too since the RIS 2.0. (Hopefully the default programming environment is just as powerful, though.)
My best Minestorms story is the time I built a mini arcade set of games to grift nickels and pennies from my younger siblings.
Nope. He wants to play fortnite and football and nothing else matters - can't get him interested in it - thought I had him with a remote control plane but nope.
The worst part is he is very bright but very lazy - he kills his homework and then has no intellectual curiosity at all and I've tried lots of things to see if he likes any of them.
Now I just play fortnite with him and let him do his own thing til he shows an interest in anything.
Hehe, I have a son like that too, he'll be 13 this year and I'm happy to say there has been a small increase in intellectual curiosity in the last six months or so. OTOH I also have a daughter who'll soon be 10 and she has the opposite problem, she's curious about everything (for instance she self-studies Japanese because she loves robots and sushi and wants to go to Japan and just the other day she learned the location of all 50 US states, just because, and we're not even Americans) but it also means she never really dives deeply into anything. So intellectual curiosity is good but it's not enough. These days I try to teach her grit, so she will stick to something even when it becomes a bit boring...
Anyway, with my son I've found that when I include him and let him help with things I do around the house, like carpentering, he's much more interested than if I try something more "artificial" for lack of a better word. It's as he wants to do "real" things, because nothing beats a computer game when it comes to not being real.
Be ecstatic with the curiosity and self-learning. Those are the skills that have served me well in life. Having a wide range of interests and never being a master in one is fine. The ability to teach herself a wide range of topics will open many doors.
More to the point, I believe the ability to foster connections between a wide variety of topics & ways of knowing will open many doors. Singular focus is not the unique path to success, aggregating knowledge and wielding it coherently (even if tenuously) is also quite potent.
Consider every stereotypical intellectual TED talk you've seen, chances are it either goes deep on one idea or develops its uniqueness by combining ideas that create a new adjacency.
Granted the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon is real but it's still predicated on mastery of singular topics being the target. Breadth combined with sufficient depth to be dangerous, as well as the ability to communicate clearly, enables people to organize and align disparate ideas that people can rally behind. Every skilled product manager, marketer, and executive needs to be able to cross over from their core expertise, and general curiosity and the ability to dive into many things at once is fundamental to those sorts of successes.
Kids will be kids. I certainly spent more time playing games than was good for me.
I just want to give em the exposure. What they do with it is up to them. My dad tried to show me basic shop skills. It wasn't meant to be. I almost wish he forced me now. It would have come in handy.
FWIW, my kids play some Fortnite and Minecraft. They build some elaborate logic stuff with Redstone.
I thought they’d be all over Boost and Mindstorms. Nope.
Lego is just us old guys doing skeumorphism. My kids prefer pure software with no side effects and no need to cleanup afterwards.
> I thought they’d be all over Boost and Mindstorms. Nope. Lego is just us old guys doing skeumorphism.
LEGO is awesome. My kids liked building big LEGO stuff, love Minecraft, etc. But we never had success with Mindstorms at home.
Now I'm becoming an educator and I run some robotics teams built around LEGO -- FIRST LEGO League, etc. With -structure- and -team identity- and -competition-, Mindstorms, WeDo, etc, are terrifically interesting. Enrollment maxes every year and the level of engagement from the kids in the program is very high. I hear stories from parents about kids evangelizing robotics to the cashier at the grocery market during checkout. :P
Mindstorms suffers from being too open ended and too hard: you have to have a very high level of motivation to follow a project through to where you have something to be proud of. Without outside guidance and clear reasons to chase a goal for a long time (like doing well in competition), it all falls apart.
edit: One thing I like about the FIRST stuff is that it's a bit of a trojan horse. It teaches some kids who are not very much into STEM to begin with a lot of STEM; but it also teaches a lot of kids who are deeply into STEM better collaboration and project management skills, how to speak well, and how to master subjective evaluations. Your best STEM kids tend to only learn a little about engineering and math from it, but they learn plenty of other things.
> you have to have a very high level of motivation to follow a project through to where you have something to be proud of. Without outside guidance and clear reasons to chase a goal for a long time (like doing well in competition), it all falls apart.
Honestly that’s what every project I try feels like :-(
Yup. Playing around with something trivial for a couple of hours is easy. Throwing away failed iterations over and over "for fun" rapidly becomes "not fun." And if there's a real chance basically no one will care if you succeed, why bother?
There's unlimited things we -could- be doing, but only a limited number are worth it, so this is rational.
I have suffered the too-many-languishing-side-projects syndrome for many years. To it was extremely satisfying when I was able to stick to one side-project for a few weeks, ironing out the kinks etc. and release my "Life on One Sheet" project [1]. Even though it did not get any love from Show HN, I have zero regrets about spending time on it because I finally shipped it in an acceptable form.
I hear ya. I am only now getting a little better about working through my project directory. I am not sure if that what it was, but house projects helped. It seems I get more invested if I do fair amout of prep work. Otherwise, it is too easy to let go.
If thats what he is interested in then game modding might be the bridge you seek. Game modding and private servers got me and most devs I know to this day into programming.
Lots of games that are scriptable too. Garrys Mod being one. Minecraft being well known for the insane mods people make.
Maybe even game creation too. All of the above were it for me though.
My intro to programming was deobfuscating the Minecraft sourcecode and then mix-and-matching the sourcecode from popular mods. It was great! Super frustrating but very rewarding.
I gave my little sister a robotics kit, and it was dismissed at first, but she got into it a month or two later. It doesn't hurt to put the options in front of kids and leave them be with it sometimes.
The instructions are clear and interactive on the app itself, at least when building "Vernie" the robot it becomes functional quite quickly. Actually asking the builder to make it some arms and legs after the torso and head are done :)
Lego boost is excellent value. Used kits go for 80 bucks (in Germany). With 600 pieces, 3 motors, the distance sensor and python/linux compatibility, what more to want?
I recently started playing mindstorm ev3 with my 5 year old. Although I have to help her a lot, she seems to be loving it.
I didn't expose my kid to lego technics for the sake and benefit of STEM/robotics, but simply that I was so sick of playing with toddler toys day in and day out that I decided to buy something I would enjoy. I guess preempting fortnight is another benefit of starting early.
I bought Lego Mindstorms EV3 while son was 3 years old - just playing, making mechanisms, winter time. He could create something by himself. The hard part was staying simple - waiting while I made even simplest robot was to exhaustive for both of us.
He is 4 years now, stacking (lego classic) is simpler, I enjoy it too. But most complex models he built with Fischertechnik (free exploration). Universal 3 [1] is amazing set (with 40 models book) and connections are much sturdier, blocks bigger, more ways to connect.
Building Lego Technic vehicle requires thinking ahead. Looks like the way forward is extending classic with studded beams (phased out in modern sets) or (from Technic side) building with Beam Frames (64179) [2].
Mine is on to that already sadly. Only thing that works now is to start on something when it's really supposed to be bedtime. Then anything becomes extremely interesting and has to be explored immediately.
I bought the EV3 when it was launched. I found it relatively complex even for adults. When I say complex I mean that you need to spend days or months to try yourbown designs. This is not a Lego where you just fit the pieces, even wheb the pieces (e.g. gear) fit together there are details you jeed to deal to have firm mechanics.
I have great memories of building and programming things in my OG Lego Mindstorms. I consider the day when I started building things from my imagination rather than from the instructions book to be the start of my career as a programmer.
It's expensive, but if you have children with interests in technical things this set is one of the most fun and productive things you can buy.
My elementary school teacher actually got the school a bunch of RCX units through some external technology teaching grant. No idea if it actually sparked the joy of programming in kids, but I think people enjoyed playing with them anyhow.
That definitely piqued my interest as well - I distinctly remember getting comfortable with the drag and drop programming interface, and wanting to write real "code" for it, but struggling to figure out how.
The scratch and python support are very welcome additions. my father still has the EV2 laying around here in the house even tho no one has played with it in the past 2 years.
I have 2 "robots" I bought last year to try to get my daughter (7) into coding.
One of them is Dash, from Wonder Workshop. The other is a Jimu BuzzBot from UBTECH.
It's incredible how fast the novelty of these wears off.
The BuzzBox we used it exactly once. Dash has seen a lot more action, but only because there are several apps with different ways of using them (One of them is a Scratch based app) and my daughter likes to use it as an RC car, plus some other fun things like sound recording.
Anything that doesn't have an open way to program them, in my opinion, are not more than rather complex toys, that do not give more entertaining that a box of Legos (As a matter of fact, I think there are not that many toys that can give as much fun and entertainment as a box of Legos - unless there's fire involved).
You can, theoretically, attach any lego block you want to a lego mindstorms robot since they have the usual connectors you would see on lego blocks or bionics.
While the mindstorms block coding is different to scratch or makecode, I find it pretty easy to do anything I want with it. And there is plenty of example code on the internet for those looking for something useful.
I'd be curious to know how this will stack up against the EV3 system. It's also interesting that they include 4 motors, ultrasonic and color sensors, but no touch sensor.
EDIT: other interesting notes: the motors have absolute positioning, and the stuff uses new connectors.
> Dan: Yep that's correct. We had it early on in our product exploration, we found we used it very little in the play. It was something we were weighing up; should we have an extra motor or should we have a fourth sensor? And very very quickly we said we'd much rather have four motors in the set, than a fourth sensor, because we could use the tap of the hub or the buttons on the hub. We often use the color sensor as a button as well, because it's very good at detecting a finger and a touch.
I've heard that this is because the color sensor can be used in place of a touch sensor in most cases, though I haven't tried that myself. Also nice that the hub has a 6 axis gyro/accelerometer.
Does anyone else find the studless beams and associated pieces much more difficult to build with than the old (very old as in Robotics Invention System) beams and pieces with studs? This was my second year coaching an FLL team. The kids seem to have difficulty building the things they need, and I don't blame them. One has to think in multiple dimensions at once. With the studs, you think vertically up or horizontal at once.
The design grammar is different. But I find it easier, because you don’t have to deal with the 4-4-5 assymetrc geometry.
That said, finding the connector that re-orients holes the way you need can ne a challenge. I have a collection of all the technic connectors and spend a fair amount of time trying multiple prototypes.
So I guess overall it is much easier to get a robust structure, but it can take some time to get there.
The assymetric geometry brings back memories. Trying to tie a stack of bricks together with a "girder" vertical across connected with the pegs!
I guess there's upsides and down. I think what bugs me is each brick before was more variable. You could build a corner if you needed to. Agreed not nearly as structurally sound thoughm
When I used to coach my daughters' FIRST Lego League team, I think I had more fun than the kids in my team. This new version of the brick and electronics promises to be really interesting.
We have the EV3 (31313) and this is a very interesting development. The PoweredUp vs EV3 connectors is not reassuring. At the moment I have PoweredUp, PowerFunctions, and EV3 motors. None are interchangeable. But if it looks like they are retiring PF and EV3, RJ11, for PoweredUp across the entire brand that is reassuring.
It's awesome that they have Python as an option out of the box. Kids bringing their lego creations to life is a great way to introduce programming.
I remember using LeJOS to run Java applications on my RCX back in the day. Had to figure out how to install and use Cygwin on the family computer. Kids these days have it so easy ;)
The EV3 can run Linux which allows interesting stuff. I've written a Prolog API which we used in University AI teaching (interleaving planning and action).
I was hoping to write a purescript API but we lost funding.
I wonder how limited or versatile the new system will be.
I have helped run one-off workshops for children to use EV3 mindstorms robots. Having also run similar workshops with other robots, the EV3's seem to generate the best response from the children. One simply needs to make a maze out of tape show some basic instructions for how to program the EV3 motors and the children will enthusiastically go about getting the EV3 to run the maze. I have also helped students build some more complicated robots for a robotic musical orchestra which was really fun, and a task the EV3 robots are well suited for. These are great robots, I only wish they were a little more affordable for poorer schools.
I can't understate how much I love the Mindstorms sets. It's almost a perfect learning toy - it's straightforward to get started (following the instructions and building the robots) and you can easily graduate to getting creative and building other robots and programming them to do whatever.
I still remember discovering how gear reductions work while playing with the original mindstorms set at age ~11. I had to explain this to high-school kids in FIRST Tech Challenge a couple years ago, they had never worked with gears before.
The IMO most amazing EV3 project (that you could even build with one set) was the Mindcuber, a Rubik's Cube solver. The robot would first scan the colors and then start solving.
On a birthday party there was an 8 year old who could solve 3x3 Rubik's Cube, so the other kids wanted to see him compete against the robot. You can only imagine the cheer when the kid won by a slight margin.
We bought an Anki Cozmo when they were heavily discounted following the announcement that the company was stopping operations. It's been great. This looks like a step up!
The first generation of Lego Mindstorms were such a game changer for me, introduced me to programming while keeping it simple enough that I could figure it out by myself.
If you want something cheap you can check out the Edison robots [0] or the micro:bit plus accessories [1]. I have played with both, and they are quite easy to use and make things with. The micro:bit is probably the better option since it is cheaper to start with and can be extended in more directions. There is a large ecosystem of first and third-party add-ons one can buy for the micro:bit to do pretty much anything a child might be interested in.
Well, as far as digital transformation— you sre seeing the result of twenty years of experiments and false starts, with the occasional winner. I think The Lego Group recognizes the importance, and is likely frustrated by how little traction they have gotten for the effort expended. That said, they keep trying.
For people invested in the Mindstorms EV3 platform this iteration is probably a bit of a disappointment. For targetting parents desperate to get their kids into STEM so that they won't be poor (I jest), this is probably good positioning/design/branding by the Lego Group.
> Although the use of Powered Up connectors on the new MINDSTORMS was to be expected, this means a break with previous platforms and NXT/EV3 hardware cannot be used directly together with this new version of MINDSTORMS.
Yes, it's not surprising, but still a pity. Lots of Mindstorms EV3 sensors are going to collect dust now (the Technic bricks will still be used, of course).
I always thought these were rediculously overpriced for what they do. LEGO certainly aims at state-sponsored educational institutes to pay huge $ for their plastic crap with few motors and microcontrollers, not private people trying to buy an interesting and educational toy for their kids. Pehaps there are people here from this industry - why there are no affordable robotics kits these days? Are there any patents involved? Or the market is just too small for anyone to care? I always thought that some sorts of meccano based kit with an MCU board & unified sensor/motor fixtures (preferrably even 3d-printable!) would be a total massive success.
You can argue that the electronics themselves are not that interesting, or that they are overpriced. That may be true. But Lego's manufacturing quality and QA is legendary. The fact that these robotics kits are seamlessly compatible with the entire system opens up some really fun possibilities.
I would recommend visiting a fan exhibition when things get back to normal. The things people come up with are astounding. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFD2e3IxO_c is the readiest example I could find).
> I always thought that some sorts of meccano based kit with an MCU board & unified sensor/motor fixtures (preferrably even 3d-printable!) would be a total massive success.
I would tend to agree with you on this, but the closest thing to that (mBot) is Chinese and frankly a total mess. You need quality hardware element and kit design, you need a holistic ecosystem approach, you need a solid, continous software investment/strategy, you need great product management, you need great documentation etc. None of that is present there.
In a way I guess it's similar to our software platform wars (i.e. Mac OS vs Windows, IOS vs Android etc).
they are not versatile and universal (i.e. a kit to build one particular hexapod or line-follower, not a kit for do it anything). Are all universal kit systems (meccano, lego) patented?
This was the thing that struck me when I ran a Mindstorms summer camp a bunch of years ago: The kids were learning to program the brick with a programming language, but the physical design of the robots they made was, itself, a kind of 'physical programming.'
And legos, more than most things, are thus programmable structures. Recall that lots of early computers (for example, the one on Apollo missions) were NOT re-programable. The code was encoded in the physical form, and couldn't be moved around without essentially re-manufacturing the device. The step to programable computers was a major milestone.
Legos make a similar leap in an engineering space instead of a computational space; it's super cool.
Lego's robotics stuff might be patented but their core brick isn't anymore. However the generic replacements like Mega Bloks just don't snap together nearly as well as LEGO. For a toddler making a little garden out of a few blocks it's fine, but you can easily make a vertical Duplo stack that's 3 times taller than the maximum stack you can make with Mega Bloks, and that kind of structural integrity becomes very important in robotics.
My understanding is that LEGO changes their molds very frequently, leading to greater expense but if you've ever played with "off brand" versions of the same thing, it's easy to see why it's important. I'm sure there's also just a brand surcharge. Of course as a socialist I wish all of this was open source and not-for-profit. But given private ownership and the profit motive, I'm pretty happy with LEGO quality.
