Rating:  -
If your child has an interest in robotics, this is the right way to get started. There are numerous kits for building individual models but combining Legos (something all kids are familiar with), and sensors/motors/software makes this a real winner. This has really sparked my eight year old son's imagination. The kit is intuitive but just advanced enough that you can plan on working closely with your child - sort of a dying practice in our culture. It will take some learning on your part in order to keep this interesting and reinforcing. Plan on developing a healthy respect for people that design complex robotic systems.
Rating: -
This is a very interesting and educational toy. It has lead to many discussions and further reading by the young teen who received it. The diagrams for the "quick start" robot are not as clear as they could be, but I was able to prevail in about an hour - the 13-year-old recipient was not. Once together, it was easy to build further robots as this "quick start" was a very useful starting module. Overall, it is fun, educational, and a good starting point to reinforce an existing interest in the field. I have found that the adults in the house were ultimately more entertained and intrigued than the younger folks. I give it five stars because it was engaging, educational, and inspired an interest in engineering. Too bad such gifts for the 12-16-year-old set are so few and far between.
Rating: -
FUN, EDUCATIONAL, and FLEXIBLE !!
If you can imagine it, you can build it.
Rating:  -
Superb toy, the only problem is that being used by a ten yrs old boy, having the possibility of buying spare parts without having to buy a whole new set is badly needed. Much more when many of the designs require all the pieces in some categories.
I recommed the toy, but I would be nice if Lego sells the small and pasive pieces apart (not the sensors, actuators or CPU)
Rating:  -
This is a fantastic but limited INTRODUCTION to robotics for children as well as for adults. What you get are, essentially, a small computer with some nice motors and some plastic body parts. The small computer (which is also the robot body) communicates with your PC to receive instructions to carry out. That's right - you must have a personal computer to use this system.
The main limitation is in the robot computer. It has a VERY small amount of memory to store programs, and the memory is not upgradeable. You only get a few Kilobytes of storage! This severely limits the size and complexity of the programs that you can create for your robot to a few dozen instructions at a time before reconnecting to the PC and downloading again - and less if you want your robot to make sounds.
If Lego had used flash storage, like the kind used in digital cameras, for its programs, then this would have improved the product 1000 percent, allowing for incredible programming potential and maybe even justifying Lego's very high price. With upgradeable storage you could even give your robot an extensive vocabulary.
It's too bad that a product with this high cost and so much potential was limited by short-sighted engineers at Lego.
Here's hoping someone comes out with a similar product with something like SD card storage.
Oh, and the software, for creating programs for the robot, is quite limited as well. Plus the update that came out in August 2007 only fixes Vista compatibility and allows some extra compression for programs, and Lego has the audacity to charge an extra $20 for people who bought the NXT before May of this year! What a shame.
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