Lego Mindstorms NXT

In the past years the whole Lego Mindstorm series has grown in popularity. But with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, Lego has created a topseller.

As soon as you open the Lego NXT box you'll notice that this product is more than a toy, you realize that it would take part of your imagination and creativity to achieve the robot of your dreams with all the lego technic pieces, sensors and motors you get.

Lego Mindstorms NXT

All the LEGO positives - modularity, durability, design - are there. On board memory is somewhat limited, but this should help in learning to write creative and efficient programs - to design bot's for very specific tasks.

Programming is the real gem in this system. It has a drag-and-drop interface using pre-programmed objects that you pull from a palette and snap to other objects. Each object is configurable. For example, the Sound object brings up a sub-window that allows you to choose between a tone and a list of sound files, set the volume, set duration, and so on. Little Lego bricks between the objects reinforce the idea that building a NXT program is like building a Lego model. Programming this way is much easier than, say, creating a web page from scratch. Lego even offers a software development kit for getting deeper into the programming.

Christmas 2008 - Top 10 Gifts For Kids