Lego Mindstorms NXT

There is a facinating article on Wired talking about the new Lego Mindstorms NXT.

At first, I was skeptical of the whole idea behind programming Legos and making robots out of them. They are for building things. I’ve never really liked the idea of sets that are used for building specific things, like all the Star Wars sets.

After reading the article though, I really like these. It reminds me of a class I took in college, where Andrew and I programmed an RC car to track along a white strip of tape on the floor. I followed the schematics, Andrew did the programming. That was a really fun course, and it was gratifying to actually see the RC car run on the track.

Maybe when our child is a bit older, we’ll be getting this for them. But that would be a long way off, and our kid might not be interested. So to play it safe, I might just need to get it for me instead…