With some dragging and dropping, you can quickly develop programs that with the click of a mouse are compiled and then downloaded over USB cable or Bluetooth to the NXT brick. National Instruments helped to develop this user-friendly environment, which is based on NI's well-known LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) software.
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The next step is to install the accompanying software on a computer and start programming your robot du jour using Lego's graphical programming language, NXT-G. With just that simple user interface, youngsters can quickly get their creations moving and doing various interesting things.īut that's just the starting point. The heart of the kit is its computer module, the NXT "brick," which the starter robot holds at a convenient angle for viewing the LCD screen and operating the four buttons. Hats off to the folks at Lego for producing something that works so well at so many levels.Īny child who can piece together Lego bricks should have little trouble assembling the starter robot, a small tracked vehicle described in the kit's 62-page instruction booklet. I'd read about Mindstorms many times, including in this magazine, but I hadn't appreciated how well this system was put together. The most recent edition, the Mindstorms-NXT 2.0 Robotics Kit ($240 from Amazon), released in 2009, boosts the overall parts count to 619, contains a slightly different mix of sensors (one ultrasonic range finder, one color sensor, and two contact sensors), and offers such niceties as a built-in Bluetooth radio and the ability to do floating-point calculations. Its 577 parts included four different kinds of sensors and three rather sophisticated servomotors.
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So for a bigger challenge, I presented him with the paragon of robotics gadgetry for children: a Lego Mindstorms set.įirst released in 2001, the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System got a significant upgrade in 2006, with the introduction of Mindstorms-NXT. My 8-year-old son, having assembled countless Lego sets over the years, jumped right to the dinosaur and had it walking around the dining room table in no time.
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An accompanying booklet shows, with a sequence of very clear pictures, how to first assemble a simple quadruped before moving on to four motorized projects: a windmill, a dog, an insect, and finally a dinosaur. Manipulating the rivets still takes fine motor skills, so I wouldn't recommend it for kids younger than about 7. It resembles a plastic Erector Set, but the pieces are joined with snap-together rivets instead of nuts and bolts. And if you choose wisely, your gift can also help inculcate some of the rudiments of engineering.įor the smaller tyke, consider an Ollo Action Kit (US $30 at Amazon or ThinkGeek). Today's robotic toys do a lot more than the windup automatons of yore. Robot playthings have been charming youngsters at least since the first tinplate robots were mass-produced in the World War II era.