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.
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.