Teaching Lego Boost: A Beginner's Guide (2020)
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It's a competition where kids learn not just how to program the robot, but important critical thinking skills, how to appropriately attack a problem, and how to make a measurable impact in their communities.
FIRST makes it easy for parents to start a team for a small group of kids in your neighborhood, and provides structure, mentorship, and the competition format at the end of the season.
Disclosure: I occasionally judge FLL events. These kids are some of the most amazing and inspiring children I've encountered, and I recommend it simply because I think it's a fantastic program.
Altough, even back then I was using NXC over the graphical programming language that comes stock. At least for personal stuff. Such a major part of why I chose programming as my career.
I dont think there is uniform process for every child.
In the end I just started spending 30 minutes every day with her and just coding, explaining and making small useful things.
here I am logging the process:
BTW now that she is beyond the initial wall, after about 3-4 months 30 minutes per day, she is enjoying making games and coming up with her own ideas. It is amazing how much you can do with just lists :)
Altough, maybe not yet.
Boost-style "programming" environments. I estimate this is good for kids somewhere between 4 and 6. Mine was 6 when I gave a robot (not Lego) that is being programmed this way. He just learned to read 2-3 months earlier.
The tracked robot could make preprogrammed sounds, flash lights, move forward and back, turn left or right in place, open and close a large claw in front of it, detect it hit something with the front or back of it.
He was done with the robot 3 days later.
I tried to extend the fun with the robot by giving exercises and showing tricks (like how you can make it run in a circle, how you can program it to continuously drive around room and bounce off of obstacles, etc.)
We switched to Scratch and he has been happily occupied with it for the past year.
We started with making some simple games and then progressed to full on debauchery in Minecraft. I caught myself spending couple of hours testing fun ideas in Minecraft.
We also have Lego robot (51515), and it is programmed in Scratch, but it seems he prefers fooling around Minecraft much more.
So here is my absolutely subjective summary:
Lego Boost (and similar) is probably fun and probably very helpful to get a kid into programming. It is so simple that you don't need to spend a lot of time explaining to the kid, and that is a good thing, most kids at this age don't like anything that requires a lot of explanation before they can start.
But be prepared to give them something else right away because it is very possible they will outgrow it quickly.
For some reason my kid doesn't like programming robots at all and prefers building interactive worlds (like pokemon etc.). We bought an older version of RPG Maker on Steam for just a few euros. They quickly learned how the event system works (which is very powerful and has state variables etc.).
For more traditional programming, writing a text adventure in python or BASIC also found their interest. Kind of this (I obviously helped with the 'while True' line):
room="kitchen"
while True:
if room=="kitchen":
print("You are in the kitchen. There is a door on the left and ...")
command=input()
if command=="left":
room="bedroom"
...
elif room=="bedroom":
...- relatively cheap
- easy to get into
But very fast there was a set of hurdles we bumped in, and the boost hub is seriously limited compared to the twice more expensive spike hub.
- It’s way slower (you won’t be able to balance the most basic structure like two wheels with two motors in an autobalancing loop)
- its sensors can have weird edge cases. For instance the gyro only reads from 0 to 180, so it’s a PITA to use it verticaly
- It doesn’t have recharging optons which makes it a PITA in many ways. Apart from dealing with AAA batteries and their size and weight, you also need to plan your builds for changing easily them as they won’t last long,
- the size is awkward, it’s not a full stud count between the anchoring parts, and matches badly with full technic blocks.
- The programming blocks are cute and all, until you realize there’s no manual nor official explanation of what they do and the params they take, and there’s around 50+ of them.
- at the end of the day it’s Lego, and education is a checkbox in their marketing slides more than a focus. There’s parts that are only available in the spike educational pack. Some only in other sets. You get sanctioned scratch only with the prime hub, the app requires a tablet (phone screen is just ridiculously hard to use), and there’s no way to back up/restore programs (up until 6 month ago at least, I haven’t checked since)
The most disappointing part was that it didn’t feel like a gateway drug to something beautiful (the spike hub ?), more like a taste of nickel and diming, no visibility into the future of the ecosystem, not giving a fuck about kids deeply learning (really, no epxort/import, no block explanations ?)
I feel kinda burned and will wait a while to get back to it in a better state of mind. For anyone getting into Lego Technic, I’d recommand the “my first born and an arm” priced Spike option.
As they get older, I'd steer clear of what I think are complex languages like Javascript, Python, Java and so on (lots of syntax and/or lots of higher level concepts) and start with a Lisp (ducks).
I really wish there were things that taught the concepts of programming with the tactile interface of Legos but didn't necessarily require an app. I know Legos on their own do part of that, but I wish they could do robotics without the app.
It's kinda hard to do programming with just physical pieces, not impossible, but still hard. It's a lot easier when you have a more dynamic input interface like a phone or a tablet.