LEGO Mindstorms

Draft

Definition

• LEGO Mindstorms is a line of Lego Group products combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego Technic pieces (such as gears, axles, beams, and pneumatic parts) to build robots and other automated or interactive systems. (Wikipedia - Mindstorms, 21:10, 21 July 2006 (MEST))

LEGO Mindstorms can be consired toys and/or educational microworlds to learn computer programming.

See also: Lego Dacta

History

Orgininally, this product has been co-developped with the Epistemology and Learning Group of MIT Media Lab. Since collaboration has ended, this research group renamed to Lifelong Kindergarden worked on other systems, e.g. Crickets (marketed by another company)

Software

• LEGO sells different variants of this product: RCX and the recent NXT which includes an icon-based visual programming language.
• For each LEGO provides software (programming languages), but there are numerous other ones that one can use instead. See the Wikipedia article

Links

• Wikipedia - Mindstorms

• LEGO MindStorms official site

• Lego Announces Mindstorms EV3, a More 'Hackable' Robotics Kit By: Erico Guizzo and Stephen Cass @ IEEE Spectrum, January 07, 2013