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.
