LEGO Mindstorms NXT Product Review

 

I am buying an LEGO Mindstorms NXT for my 11 year old son who has been begging for one for awhile. He is a member of the Robotics team at his elementary school (his 3rd year) and so he interacts with these every day, but wants one of his own to play around with at home.

For those of you whose children are or may be interested in science/engineering/robotics, etc. or are just looking for something creative to do, there is a worldwide program out there that they can join to help develop these skills and have fun at the same time! Lego created this program about 15 years ago and it is now worldwide. Go to [...] to learn all about it. The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Program is absolutely wonderful. They start out at age 6, with the Junior FIRST Lego League (JFLL); 9-14 yr olds. [or about 3-8th graders] compete in the FIRST Lego League (FLL), using the NXT or RCX (older model) robots; and when they hit high school, they begin building real, actual working robots to compete with.

If your school does not have a team, look into starting one (anyone can: schools, churches, boy/girl scout troops, community organizations, whatever). The fees are not much after the initial kit cost (around $600, which includes the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot and all tournament supplies) and often you can find sponsors to cover some, if not all, of the fees. The kids do not just play with robots, they also work very hard on a research project which they present to a panel of judges at each tournament (there is usually a tourney for city, region, state, national, and then international if your team qualifies for each next tournament), and there are awards for many things: robot competitions, teamwork, research, robot design, team spirit, overall score, etc. If you are looking for a great extracurricular for your gifted or creative child, this is it!

Mama Tuck

 

 

I purchased the Lego Mindstorms NXT for my twelve year old's birthday. Within fifteen minutes he had the first robot assembled, programmed and working. The programming interface is excellent. Thank you National Instruments for providing a Lego version of Labview to program the Robot. My son has already learned some basic computer programming structures and design patterns without even knowing. Loops, branching and object oriented programming. He even made a quick change to a program to get it working better than the kits suggested program. We have built all the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots that the kit teaches and a few other robots from a book we purchased. I highly recommend the LEGO Mindstorms NXT to anyone interested in learning about robots and computer programming. (I am a computer scientist and have wanted to teach my son about programming, but have not found the right platform until now. Thanks Lego)

K Pack

 

 

Here's a Great video from YouTube on the LEGO Mindstorms NXT; Click Here

 

YouTube has a great tutorial video on the LEGO Mindstorms NXT: Click Here

 

Part 2 of the YouTube tutorial Video on the LEGO Mindstorms NXT: : Click Here:

 

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LEGO Mindstorms NXT is one of the most wanted gifts for Christmas.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT and other Christmas gifts can be found at Christmas top 10 gifts 2008,