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> I got the original Lego Mindstorms 1.0 kit for my 8th birthday - there was no programming interface, just a way to select one of 256 possible sequences of high-level actions the robot would perform in a loop.

Are you sure you're not thinking of the Robotics Discovery Set? The blue brick? It had a bunch of predefined things you could stitch together to make little programs directly via the brick's interface.

RIS 1.0 definitely had a programming interface via the serial IR tower.

You're right! It was the blue brick with the pre-defined programs.

> how much dead weight the team was carrying in students who participated in the middle school Lego league, who did not have even the basic coding/engineering skills to make any contribution to the high school team other than paying the membership dues

That kind of just sound like middle school. The clubs and sports I was involved in were things I was very bad at.

It sounds a lot like college and school as a whole for me. I was in a top 5 CS program, too. Entering the workforce was the first time I felt empowered by the team dynamic. Quite possibly this is where imposter syndrome comes from. Maybe I’ve progressed to my maximum level of incompetence where I am now the deadweight.

I never thought of it this way.

6 years in and many people around me look up to and/or respect me and I always feel like they're making a horrible choice.

I'm referring to the FIRST robotics competition for high school students - it is normally an afterschool activity, and most high schools in the Bay Area have a team. The team was open for anyone to join, but only the handful of students who were actually interested in participating would join.

I joined FIRST with very high hopes - I had been programming in C++ for several years by the time I reached high school, and had built small robots at home (and also participated in our middle school Lego robotics team).

I quit after two months. Our team was dominated completely by the engineer parents/mentors and a couple of "wunderkind" (aka children of the engineer parents). Outside of the select few, most people were completely brushed off and just sat in an empty room dicking around. The parents were too competitive and did a lot of the work, the stakes were too high for them, so failure wasn't allowed, so nobody learned anything. You either joined an expert or were "dead weight".

I also had the original mindstorms set from 1996-98, the compute module was the big yellow brick (i think the RCX), you interface with it via a little serial IO tower. There was absolutely a programming interface. It was visual and very scratch like and it was evolved eventually into the programming environment that came with the ev3. It did require a pc to use I think there was a cdrom in the box that contained the software.

Since you mentioned the raspberry pi, you can use one of those with the latest lego spike system as well via a pi HAT: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/build-hat/

To me as a kid and well as someone a bit older who often pulls out legos to mock up mechanical systems before I dig into solidworks the programming of the robot was a bit secondary to getting the mechanics worked out, and legos are a super fast way to prototype a lot of things (though they do have their limitations for sure). While I'm not one for shielding young people from serious tools, a school or a summer camp might for insurance reasons, lego might still be the way to go.

Totally agree with you on the benefits of Legos as a rapid prototyping tool, which is certainly an impulse I have as well. My concern is that a lot of kids get stuck on the Lego Mindstorms toy model of things, and aren't exposed to anything else. I actually used to run summer camps to teach about technology, and the main issue I faced with teaching serious tools was finding/training the instructors.

Kids, right? How dare they not know everything before they are taught!

I was there to teach them, the problem was most of them didn't have the intrinsic motivation to learn. Everyone was excited to be assigned some work, but only a handful of students actually went through and finished the tasks they were given, while most were content to simply get on their phone or play an online game.

A decade ago, I was a student on the team, and I remember everyone doing a lot more with a lot less. We had to program microcontrollers with Stamp BASIC, pull reference books off the shelf, and go on epic debugging journeys. The team today was overall far less motivated, although the exceptional programming/technical skills of certain students was unlike anything we had 10 years ago, and it was this handful of students that pulled the entire team forward.

One time a parent of a notoriously lazy student asked me how they were doing, and I answered honestly that their kid doesn't do anything but play games on the Internet, and they would be better off using their after-school hours playing a sport or literally doing anything else. What followed was a vile and vitriolic rant about how their kid was the leader of the Lego robotics team, and maybe it's because you aren't assigning them the right work, and on and on. Just one decade ago, students can and did get kicked off the team for being lazy, but you can't deny anyone an opportunity these days...

Everything is so accessible now that the kids with a desire to learn do so at a rate that far exceeds anything possible with some computer magazines and a shitty implementation of BASIC, which was all some people had when they were kids back in the day.

Of course, that means that the kids that did end up programming back then were self-selected to be really motivated. If not, they wouldn't have done it. There's a serious selection bias if you're looking at kids who programmed then and now, the population of programming children is much larger (and much more average) than it was decades ago.

>What followed was a vile and vitriolic rant about how their kid was the leader of the Lego robotics team, and maybe it's because you aren't assigning them the right work, and on and on.

The quality of American parenting has taken a big nose-dive in 10 years...

raspberry pi is not a real product anymore