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.
