Showing posts with label lego. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lego. Show all posts

Monday, August 19, 2013

Lego robots ate my son

My son was at his mom’s house and his phone was dead. So I posted a question to his wall on Facebook: “We have a chance to review the new Lego Mindstorms robotics kit. Are you interested?”


Eli’s reply, seconds later: “Need you even ask?”


Not really, no. My son and I have been playing with Lego since he had enough hand-eye coordination to snap two pieces together. We’ve been to Legoland twice. I paid for him to attend a not-inexpensive Lego Mindstorms summer camp four years ago. Almost 16 years old now, he told me in July that he was interested in an engineering career focused on robotics. So yeah, I knew what the answer would be. Let’s build some programmable robots, Dad! Woohoo!


What I didn’t realize was that there would be a bittersweet aftertaste to the awesomeness of geeking out over Lego Mindstorms EV3. Helping him assemble the coolest snake robot we’d ever built (or, to be more accurate, watching him assemble that robot) dragged me back into the past more than it thrilled me on the state-of-the-art robot future. Lego Mindstorms is just a year younger than Eli. It is advancing in fearsome capability as remorselessly as Moore’s Law. But my son is growing up even faster.


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Salon.com



Lego robots ate my son

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Why do Lego men have holes in their heads?


HAVE you ever wondered why those little yellow Lego minifigures have holes in their heads?



Well, it’s simpler than you probably thought.


The Danish toy manufacturer started putting the holes in the heads as a safety precaution.


“We added this hole on the top of the head just in case any kids got one of the heads stuck in their throat. That way they would be able to keep breathing.”


In the same series of questions, Lego says it produces about 19 billion Lego pieces a year, and has made more than 400 billion bricks since 1958.



NEWS.com.au | Technology News



Why do Lego men have holes in their heads?

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Building Tutorial - Robotics Engineering For Dummies?

With all of the construction toys that have been on the market for decades, what consumed your time as a child? The potency of the concept of building block toys isn\’t just in the amount of entertainment they provide to our children. Young engineers are actualized everyday when they apply their imagination in creatively constructive ways with the aforementioned toys. The educational value of these particular toys for young children is immense, and the early brain development of children playing with building blocks has been proven to be fortified to the nth degree.


In the not-too-distant past, children began to turn away from these physically interactive and mentally demanding toys, because of the lack of mystery from an inanimate object, and focused the majority of their childhood on video and computer games. Games such as these can effectively be an important part of a child\’s intellectual growth, but it is more-so believed they promote laziness and absence of mental stimulation. Some argue they promote violence and obscene behavior not expected from children, but no evidence exists to prove this.


Video game fanatics can also argue the advantages of computerized games for a child\’s mental aptitude, yet the creative problem solving skills involved in playing with Lego is exponentially more stimulating as far as a recent comparison. What about if the two (computer games and Lego) were combined into one astoundingly powerful super toy? And so FIRST NXT 2.0 Leage is born.


The strategy involved producing a product that allowed children to build whatever their imagination had in stock for them and program these creations to be fully autonomous. The autonomy of these self-built projects is what attracted so many young techies because really the sky was the limit as far as what figments of dreams could be achieved. It continues to amaze and mystify children, and even adults, that it is actually possible to make something at home that they can program to do whatever their heart desires.


The RCX reprogramming revolutionized the toy industry as it was now geared towards entertaining kids as well as serving eager engineering and technical minds in terms of education. Schools all over the world have incorporated the LabView for NXT platforms into educating students on mechanical engineering, computer science, and control systems with sensory feedback. Children who are mechanically inclined can now freely express themselves and advance their imaginative creativity, and engineering students around the globe have a fun and simple way to delve into entry-level robotics systems.


Learn more about robot building for kids. See why the author recommends the information on I/O on Intelligent Brick.. This article, Building Tutorial – Robotics Engineering For Dummies? is released under a creative commons attribution license.



Building Tutorial - Robotics Engineering For Dummies?