New Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor
lego.com
lego.com
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.
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.
Honestly that’s what every project I try feels like :-(
There's unlimited things we -could- be doing, but only a limited number are worth it, so this is rational.
Also an infinite number of parts. Lego is cool, but the pieces are expensive :-(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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].
[1] https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/products/playing/advanced/5...
[2] https://rebrickable.com/parts/64179/technic-beam-5-x-7-open-...
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.
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.
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.
I was never taught these kind of things anywhere else.
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).
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.
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.
There's an interesting interview with the product designers over at New Elementary: http://www.newelementary.com/2020/06/lego-mindstorms-51515-r...
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.
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
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 ;)
I wonder how limited or versatile the new system will be.
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.
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.
Edit: My brother owns that set, I am a few years younger and got to play with all his LEGO. Great times.
https://www.hispabrickmagazine.com/content/2020/06/12/the-ne...
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.
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).
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.
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).
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).
Without it high quality manufacturing and QA won't help.