This is going to be a lot more revolutionary than a lot of people think. I mentor Lego Robotics teams, and this year's season will mark my eighth year doing Lego Robotics. During this time, I've shown the kids (ages 9-14) hundreds of programming-related things, ranging from quadcopters to Arduinos to WebGL experiments to Leap Motion devices, and what never fails to captivate them is when they make the Lego Mindstorm brick display something.

When kids on the team seem reluctant to start programming, I always bust out the smiley face demo: they push a button and the smiley face smiles. It's ridiculously simple, but that's part of the appeal - they see that it's simple and they want to know how to do it themselves. If I were to show them an Arduino blinking out a message in Morse code using an LED, they assume that it's over their head and could care less how it was done, but when I show a simple demo using the Mindstorms display everyone's captivated.

Each Mindstorms brick costs $200-$250, and parts can add hundreds of dollars to this cost. Since the price of the MicroView is 4-5 times smaller, there can be 4-5 times more people captivated by them - not to mention how school districts that have fewer funds can now introduce students to programming as well.