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I don't know if I'm a bit younger than most on here (late twenties), but my parents got me into Lego Mindstorms quite young. I was 8 when they bought me the the

I don't know if I'm a bit younger than most on here (late twenties), but my parents got me into Lego Mindstorms quite young. I was 8 when they bought me the the Robotics Invention System 2.0 set. For those that remember, it was the yellow RCX brick based on the Renesas H8/300. That single gift basically kicked off my entire interest (and later career) in computing. The hacker community surrounding them was _insane_. I got really tired of the block based programming after a few weeks. My first "text" programming language was NQC ("not quite C") for the RCX, which was a C-like language that ran on top of the standard lego firmware. My first experience with proper C was legOS/brickOS, a toolchain to write software for the RCX with GCC. My first experience with Java was leJOS, which managed to fit a functional Java VM into the 32 KiB of RAM of the RCX. My first experience with Linux was because both of these tools functioned better there (except leJOS for NXT, bluetooth downloads always caused me trouble). My dad kind of regretted it when his 10 year old built the disk launcher from the ultimate builder's set and hooked it up to the mindstorms vision command set to make a disk launcher that fired at anyone entering the basement... So, Mindstorms introduced me to programming, then Linux, C, and Java.

bscphil 6y ago
Similar story in my case. I got into electronics generally with one of those Radioshack 200-in-one sets I got for Christmas. I actually requested the RIS 2.0 set myself, must have found out about it through a catalog. I was fortunate in that my birthday falls very close to Christmas, because I got basically nothing else that year. These sets were (and are) expensive for working class families. I was always vaguely aware that you could "go deeper" with the RCX, with real programming languages and so on, but I never did so myself. I don't think the Lego company put much effort into introducing kids to these advanced features at the time - you had to know about it and have access to a community that could teach you things, and at that age I had no computer and we had dial-up internet anyway. So I stuck with the basic stuff. I think that's actually an indication of the direction Lego is taking with this, unfortunately. It looks like the set is designed around 5 different robot designs you can build, rather than being open ended. I think this makes advertising easy, because a kid who sees the ad can say "I want to play with that robot", whereas an entirely open-ended set has less appeal. But not being forced to be creative turns these sets into novelties which kids will put aside after they've built each of the robots once. They've made the programmable blocks more "friendly" too since the RIS 2.0. (Hopefully the default programming environment is just as powerful, though.) My best Minestorms story is the time I built a mini arcade set of games to grift nickels and pennies from my younger siblings.

bscphil 6y ago

Similar story in my case. I got into electronics generally with one of those Radioshack 200-in-one sets I got for Christmas. I actually requested the RIS 2.0 set myself, must have found out about it through a catalog. I was fortunate in that my birthday falls very close to Christmas, because I got basically nothing else that year. These sets were (and are) expensive for working class families. I was always vaguely aware that you could "go deeper" with the RCX, with real programming languages and so on, but I never did so myself. I don't think the Lego company put much effort into introducing kids to these advanced features at the time - you had to know about it and have access to a community that could teach you things, and at that age I had no computer and we had dial-up internet anyway. So I stuck with the basic stuff. I think that's actually an indication of the direction Lego is taking with this, unfortunately. It looks like the set is designed around 5 different robot designs you can build, rather than being open ended. I think this makes advertising easy, because a kid who sees the ad can say "I want to play with that robot", whereas an entirely open-ended set has less appeal. But not being forced to be creative turns these sets into novelties which kids will put aside after they've built each of the robots once. They've made the programmable blocks more "friendly" too since the RIS 2.0. (Hopefully the default programming environment is just as powerful, though.) My best Minestorms story is the time I built a mini arcade set of games to grift nickels and pennies from my younger siblings.