Lego Robot

Using Lego-like roBlocks to build robots sounds much more fun than assembling circuits on breadboards and then writing assembly language programs to make stuff work - that's all we had back in the day. It will be wonderful to have these for sale with open source hardware and software. That could give everyone a fair shot at getting in touch with their inner geek. For those of us who went through engineering school quite cluelessly, this may be what it takes to finally "get" the concepts that we never did in four years there. Clearly, there would be a need for cook books to get folks started on their maiden Lego robot projects and it obviously makes a great educational tool for kids.

Schweikardt said that children who were around 8 years old could start playing with the blocks and make simple robots with them. Older children would start understanding how the blocks worked together to form the entire robot.

The simple logic behind the functions of the robot should help the children enhance their lateral thinking skills. According to a Carnegie Mellon press release, the blocks can also be reprogrammed to perform slightly different tasks from what they were originally designed to do. For example, the five logic blocks known as “and,” “or,” “not,” “nand,” and “xor,” enable children to improve how their robots react to different stimuli