This is off tangent, but I fell in love with computing through Lego Mindstorms. It is the most amazing gift you can give to a child. Just imagine how it feels t

This is off tangent, but I fell in love with computing through Lego Mindstorms. It is the most amazing gift you can give to a child. Just imagine how it feels to be 12 and to put these blocks together and then you see them move! After that you can teach it to do stuff! I can make whatever I want! It's an understatement that Lego Mindstorms changed my life. The best thing about it is that it teaches things in ways that I could easily grasp be it concepts of computing like decision trees or torque. Before I even knew what those words were I knew, somehow, what they meant. Torque meant that if I tried to make a prosthetic hand then I couldn't place a motor at the end of the forearm as it would kill the motor lifting it no matter how much I would gear it up. Why? Because it was like a door which I could push and it got easier to push the farther away I was from the hinge. Hence, it is easier for the weight to push the arm down at that end! Moreover, you can teach her programming through languages for the NXT. There are derivatives of C/C++, ASM, Python, Java, Ruby, MATLAB, Ada and other projects lying around on the internet (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT#Programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT#Programming). I've tried to repeat this with all types of kids in my neighborhood and it works. Even for the most impatient kids it is a hook that gets them interested in how the world works. It's just magic. [edit: I made some horrible dyslexic errors. Sorry about that. If there are any more left then please forgive me.]