the onda

This Wired article on the next generation of Lego Mindstorms (the NXT) is making the rounds as a testament to "embracing user innovation" or "long-tail" product development. I'd like to point out something that is less cool but more important: that this new toy could unleash an incredible amount of creativity in the kids who play with it.

Technically, I would have killed for something like this when I was nine years old-- in fact I would have killed for the first two Mindstorms, but with the NXT Lego seems to have addressed the most important short-coming of the other two kits-- the "time to pleasure." As an adult, I remember fiddling with the original Mindstorms for about 5 hours before managing to get a little car-with-feelers that would avoid driving off the table only to have a bug in its software cause it to back into a horrible death off the other end of the table.

Apparently this time around, an explicit design goal is "20 minutes to robot" which seems to me to be the right amount of time to get the right type of kid absolutely hooked on programming things that respond to the environment and which you can build with your own two hands.

Back in the late 70s, I got a toy from my dad for Christmas one year which set me on a course that ended up with me building software for a living-- a Milton Bradley "Big Track." It was a programmable tank which you could make go forward and backward, turn in-place, and flash a "laser light / noisemaker" on the tank's nose via a simple stored program you would enter into a keypad on the top of the tank. It took almost no time to grasp the concept (despite having to have the instructions translated for me into Spanish), made for hours and hours of fun, and most importantly, provided the first "platform" that I ever programmed for. It was an easy move from the Big Trak to the Timex Sinclair and then the the Apple ][. Each device had its own kind of magic-- for the Big Trak it was this crazy notion that there was something in the real world that you could make "do stuff" on command.

When I mentioned the new Mindstorms (and the possibility that it will launch the career of a whole slew of Roboticists) to a friend yesterday, he argued that in the age of the Xbox 360 with its ultra-realistic games, kids weren't interested in programming anymore. And to some degree this is true-- the days of typing pages worth of Applesoft Basic from the back of Byte magazine for a low-res game are certainly gone for good.

Before we lose all hope, let's go back to the Big Trak for a moment: years after it had failed to make the move with me to the US, I remember being introduced to Seymour Papert's Logo programming language in school. Like millions of other kids, I was encouraged to paint the screen with my turtle which was amusing for a little while. For me though, compared to the challenges of navigating the Big Trak between the chairs and the dining room table from 20 feet away, Logo felt constrained and limited-- perhaps in much the same way that the XBox-360 experience might feel to a kid capable of building a home version of RobotWars.

I can not wait for this toy to come out.