Edison Robotics: Early Review

Quick recommendation for the Edison robot. I kickstarted the project ages ago, and got our robot just in time for Christmas, but you can now order from the company website. Edison is a little two-wheeled robot with built in sensors. He comes pre-programmed with several typical robot programs like obstacle avoidance, clap-controlled driving, line-following, light-following, and being controlled by your TV remote. In a very nifty innovation, these programs are activated by having him drive over barcodes, so it's easy to get started without having to hook him up to a computer, and it takes only a second to change from one program to another.

This means that Edison is very nearly instant gratification, because figuring out how to get him doing these cool things is easy peasy lemon squeezy; the Tiny Tornado, for instance, is Edison-independent after about ten minutes of practice with me. TT is building mazes for Edison to navigate with his obstacle sensors right now.

But! Edison is also programmable with free downloadable software, for kids who are into that. I don't know the limits of his programmability. And he has stud and tube connectors that are Lego-compatible.

There are three downloadable books for Edison. The first is You're a Controller, and teaches the basics of using the preset programs; this is what TT and I have used, and it's well-designed and clearly written. The second is You're a Programmer; there's a draft on the Edison website. And the third, which is forthcoming, is You're a Builder, which will focus on Edison's Lego compatibility.

The website also has a free downloadable mat to print, about 24x36", which includes a line-following maze and the preprogrammed barcodes.

I strongly recommend Edison if you've got a kid interested in robotics. It costs only $49. For $89, you can get two, and make them interact, for instance with the robot version of Sumo wrestling. It avoids both the cost and the start-up challenges of Lego Mindstorms, so it's great if you're just into casual robotics play, but seems like it could be a great first robot for a kid who will develop a more serious interest.

Book Report: Lego, A Love Story

I read Lego: A Love Story the other day. It's one of those stunty journalistic books writers pitch to publishers: Jonathan Bender decided to spend a year learning to build with Lego and exploring the world of AFOLs, or Adult Fans of Lego, and somebody gave him an advance and a book contract to do it.

I found the book kind of annoying at times, even though I knew that was unfair. Bender and his wife were trying to conceive during the research for the book, so he hadn't had my experience of becoming a de facto Lego expert because the kids have dragged me, willy nilly, along with them. And he hadn't played with Lego since he was a kid. But even recognizing that I have been steeped in Lego for at least the last seven years and Bender has not, I could not keep myself from rolling my eyes sometimes at his ignorance. For instance, he thought someone was pulling his leg when they told him that Lego makes brick separators. Tyro!

And, I am sorry to say that Bender is not much of a writer. Competent, but pedestrian.

Still, the book was fun. I like reading about quirky subcultures, and AFOLs certainly qualify. I am amused by the kinds of things people get worked up over, like a turn-of-the century change in some of the standard colors that resulted in new bricks not perfectly matching old bricks; in particular, the new gray brick, which was perceived to have a bluish tinge, was much reviled. If you mention the color "bley" to an AFOL, they will know what you're talking about. And they'll probably have an opinion.

Other favorite controversies include the divide between purists, who believe in building only with genuine unmodified Lego pieces, and those who are willing to tinker to achieve their vision. Bender tells one story of a builder cutting a brick in half to get the right size, and there are some very spiffy custom minifig decals floating around out there. Here's a guide to customizing your own minifig, in case you're so inclined.

Possibly my favorite thing that AFOLs get worked up about is a recent Lego innovation in which the bags of pieces in large building sets are numbered, and the instructions suggest you open only one at a time and don't mix them. This is seen as patronizing, as reflecting a continuing tendency of the Lego company to pander to juveniles while ignoring adult fans (a toy company focusing on children! The nerve!). Some, at least, also see it as an unwarranted intrusion into the builder's process. "Who are they to tell me how I sort my bricks?" one AFOL is quoted as saying. Who indeed?

The book makes me really want to visit a Lego convention. I've thought for a long time of taking the kids to BrickWorld in Chicago to visit the exhibition halls, but after reading about Bender's experiences, I got a little itch to get a registration and experience the whole thing. They apparently do all kinds of fun contests, like "blind builds," where everyone has to build the same set while not being able to see the pieces, contests where people have to try to do something creative with a specific set, and "speed builds," which are exactly what they sound like. I was especially interested in the idea of "Building in the Bag," which is exactly what it says: building your Lego set without opening the plastic bag the pieces come in. Honestly, all the contests sounded like so much fun they made me want to organize a little mini-Lego convention for kids here in Lansing where we would do all these fun things (kids do not get Lego conventions. Lego conventions are for the big boys).

I read about the history of the Lego company, including its many ill-advised efforts to attract girls to the hobby by making things pink. And I learned all kinds of fancy AFOL jargon, like the "SNOT" building technique (Studs Not On Top), which results in a smooth finish.

I learned about the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum in Ohio, one man's labor of love in an old middle school, which isn't the Lego museum because he could never come to an agreement with the company about rights. But it's all Lego, baby, and I say: road trip!

At one point, Bender discusses Mega Bloks, the Canadian company that began to make Lego-compatible pieces after Lego's patent expired in 1988. Bender says that AFOLs are disdainful of Mega Bloks and won't use them, and that they're frustrated by trying to buy brick lots on, say, eBay, because casual users often let their Mega Bloks and Lego intermingle and then sell them all as Lego. Even after he's spent a year building (and dutifully purged his collection of Mega Bloks), Bender still sees this as simply a preference, or as a snobby in-group thing. "It's the Coke vs. Pepsi of the Lego world," he says.

He is wrong. I say he is wrong, David agrees, and Eric, when I told him what Bender said, vehemently said that he is wrong. I wonder how many AFOLs have written to Bender to tell him he is wrong? Probably hundreds. I'm tempted to drop him a note myself.

Mega Blok simply doesn't have Lego's quality control. We have never had a Lego set we couldn't build, but when we have made the occasional foray into the world of Mega Blok, we routinely came up against bricks that simply would not stay together the way the instructions claim they will. Even though Mega Blok sometimes has cool licenses (I think it was their Halo license that attracted Eric the last time), we decided not to buy any more. They're a little cheaper than Lego, but a lot crappier. Stick with the Danes, that's what we say.

I think that, although I almost never build on my own (I'm the brick-finding helper most of the time), I am an AFOL anyway. Because what Lego does for the kids who love it is amazing, and what the kids do with Lego is amazing. I find myself fearing and dreading what AFOLs call "the dark ages," the years between about 12 or 13, when kids lose interest in Lego, and the time when they (maybe) come back to it as adults. It's hard to imagine Eric, whose bedroom is practically a Lego museum, packing it all away. That will be a sad day and the end of an era. But, like the dutiful Lego mom I am, I'll keep the boxes. "For the grandkids," I'll say. But I'll be thinking, maybe for him, too.

Lego WeDo Review: Now that we've been using it awhile

Carl, who was 6 at the time, got Lego WeDo for Christmas, and after our first experiments with it, I was very enthusiastic. Now that we've been using it for awhile, I have some reservations about it I'd like to mention.

Building the robots is still very fun, and the programming interface is bright and easy for Carl to use. The information is well-organized and very clear, for both me and him. But we have some consistent problems with our robots. I mentioned in my first review that WeDo uses standard Lego bricks for construction, rather than the girder-and-connector building style used in Lego Mindstorms robotics and Lego Technics. The top image at this page is of a Mindstorms robot that shows the girder building components. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you can see some images of WeDo robots for comparison.

The WeDo robots are very easy for Carl to build, and they look cute. The problem is that the standard Lego bricks just don't hold onto each other the way Mindstorms NXT girders do. So, under stress, they come apart. Our boat-on-a-stormy-sea WeDo robot, for instance, regularly beat itself to pieces. This is very frustrating for Carl.

Another problem we've bumped into is that many of the robots can really only do a single thing. We were spoiled when Carl chose the Dancing Birds robot as his first project; once you've built it, you can program the birds to spin in the same or opposite directions, at different speeds, for differing durations, and with different sounds. They can be made to speed up and slow down. Carl played around with programming his Dancing Birds robot for a long time over several days.

Alas, some of the other projects are less playable. One reason the boat kept beating itself to pieces was that it couldn't tolerate the speed of the motor being adjusted any higher than in the sample program; the other is that the Lego studs just weren't strong enough to hold the boat's stand to the baseplate when there was repetitive movement.

Today we built a giant that stands up and roars; once we built it and copied the sample program, we couldn't figure out anything else to do with it, except run the motor in reverse so it sat down again. You had to run the motor for a very specific amount of time or the giant either didn't stand all the way up or was flipped over by the lever controlling it. The rubber band connecting the motor pulley to the lever pulley came loose about half the time. We watched the giant stand up once; Carl experimented and found 12 different ways for the thing to go wrong; and 10 minutes later, he was done. His verdict? "Well, that was boring."

So, what do I think overall? There are still some good qualities to the program. The robots are designed to demonstrate the use of certain mechanics; for instance, our standing-up giant was raised by a lever that was driven by a worm gear. The software points out these things, and Carl finds them interesting. But if mechanics is the point, then perhaps some kits that introduce simple machines, either from Lego or elsewhere, would be more cost-effective. I know that a big part of what is most fun for Carl is experimenting with programming the robot to do different things; if too many of the robots are single-action, that's too many days he's walking away from the computer with the word "boring" on his lips. We still have a lot of robots to try out, so much will depend on the ratio of good ones to duds.

Lego says the WeDo kit is for kids 7 and up; Carl just turned seven last week, so he's at the young end of the range for it, and yet one of my thoughts is that this might be better for younger kids. Or maybe for 7-year-olds who haven't been fellow travelers for their older brothers' Mindstorms robots already.

My buying advice? If $180 isn't a lot of money for you and you have a 5, 6, or 7 year old who is really into robotics but not ready for Mindstorms, go for it. There is some fun to be had here, and some basics to learn. Otherwise, wait a couple of years until your kid can accompany you on some Mindstorms adventures; Mindstorms has been a much better investment.

Premature Curriculum Review: Lego Mindstorms NXT Mayan Adventure

One of the challenges for homeschooling parents trying to evaluate curriculum is that, whether at websites like homeschoolreviews.com or on people's own blogs, there is a tendency for moms to post reviews during the first few glowing days. So there are a lot of reviews that start, "I just got this in the mail and it looks great!" or, "We've been using this for two weeks and my kids love it!" It makes sense; everybody's enthusiasm is highest when things are new. But it's not all that helpful in terms of knowing how it really worked out. It's a nice treat when someone comes back a few months later to update their review, or someone who used a curriculum over a full year, or more, writes a detailed review.

I have resolved, myself, to try not to write about curriculum until we've really given it a shot.

And I am breaking that resolution now. Sorry.

One of Eric's Christmas presents was the Lego Mindstorms NXT: The Mayan Adventure homeschool pack, which includes the book and some extra parts you will need for some of the challenges. We haven't started it yet, but I read through it the other day and am--yes--very excited about it. We're going to work on it this afternoon, and I will certainly try to post more as we get into it.

The book sets up five robotics challenges in the context of a story about a boy with an NXT kit who goes on an archaeology expedition with his uncle. They find themselves at a pyramid that has, as one of its security features, tiny tunnels leading to hidden switches and doorways, designed to be navigated by trained spider monkeys. The team has no spider monkeys. But they do have an NXT kit! So the robots need to be designed to do the spider monkeys' jobs. For instance, the first challenge is to build and program a robot that can travel ten feet down an 10-foot tunnel, turn 90 degrees, travel 8 feet, turn 90 degrees again, travel 3 feet and press a switchplate, and then turn around and come back out again.

Each challenge is set up over four chapters: one that tells the story of the boy; one that I really like that uses a planning and design worksheet to think through the specific tasks the robot has to do and how they might be done, and what constraints exist (for instance, this first robot has to be pretty narrow to get around the corners, and it has to be able to turn, which means using two motors); and then one about building the robot, and one about programming and de-bugging it. I like that the chapters on building and programming present various options, like using either the optical sensor or the pressure sensor to tell the robot when it's reached a corner, and model a trial-and-error approach. For instance, the author writes that it took four tries for him to get his robot right, and he describes what he did for each try, what went wrong, and what he tried to fix it.

I don't know how much patience Eric will have with the design process part; he likes to jump into things. But I like the way the book is organized. We're going to take our first shot at it this afternoon; I'll let you know how it goes. If I can find the battery charger for my camera battery, maybe there will even be pictures of our robot.

UPDATE: This afternoon we read the first chapter of the story, and the chapter on the Design and Planning process. To my pleased surprise, Eric loved the Design and Planning part, which has pre-printed journal pages on which you name your robot, describe in a paragraph what it will do (he dictated to me), break its job into a numbered list of individual tasks, think about constraints ("it has to be small enough to turn the corners without bumping into the wall"), brainstorm ideas, and sketch robot ideas. He was really into it. He wants to try something different than the author; the author's robot turns around and goes forward out the tunnel, but Eric wants his robot to back up. He was also the one who then spotted the flaw in his plan: the robot will need a sensor on the back, then, to keep it from bumping the walls when going backwards, as well as one on the front. He still wants to try this plan even though it will make the robot a little bigger.

After we did that part, we took a few minutes and sorted all his Mindstorms pieces into their proper places in his storage bin, and then he was ready to stop for the day. He's excited to build and test his robot tomorrow, and to show his dad his Design and Planning journal this evening. Fun!

They Build Things

Back when I was in literary studies, we used to use the term "overdetermination" to mean that a text was making too much of something, asking us so excessively to believe something that we became inclined to believe the opposite. Shakespeare understood the notion; he wrote, "the lady doth protest too much," meaning that only someone in love would feel the need to say so very many times and in so very many ways that she was not in love.

It's also possible to overdetermine something in such a way that only one outcome is possible. So you get English grad students sitting around with a book written by someone twice as smart as they will ever be, sneering, "I don't know, I thought the climactic saber fight was a little overdetermined, you know what I mean?"

Sometimes I think we have overdetermined our children.

I come from families of men who work with their hands. My dad built the house I grew up in, literally; my brother has built a dune buggy from scratch, and a race car out of a car that had not previously been a race car. When my brother wanted a minibike as a kid, nobody bought him one. My dad and grandpa built him one out of old lawnmower motors and steel bars they had lying around, which they welded into a frame. My extended family on both sides is full of people who fix their own cars, and make their living repairing or maintaining machines or structures.

David is not that kind of guy, and wasn't raised by that kind of guy. His dad was a surveyor, but for recreation, he played competitive bridge. David was not raised to think it's a moral failing to hire someone to do a job you could just as well do yourself, like replacing an engine block or adding a porch to the front of the house or re-wiring the guest bathroom.

Still, David's a very smart guy, and an engineer in his way: he is a software engineer. So when we needed donor sperm to have our first two kids, we looked for somebody smart and with a logical mind. There weren't any software engineers in the catalog, but there was a guy who was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a 3.85 gpa. "Smart!" we said. "A logical thinker!" we said, and ordered three little vials.

Imagine our surprise when our firstborn turned out to be the kind of person who can make anything out of anything--put him in front of any material that can be manipulated in three dimensions, whether Lego, modeling clay, or leftover forks, and he'll build something amazing. All those three-dimensional-thinking and doing-stuff-with-your-hands genes are just a little overdetermined, I sometimes think. Like we doomed him to a career in engineering or the skilled trades, like we left him with not really all that many choices. "Maybe we should have chosen a sensitive poet," we joke sometimes.

It's not really like that, though--Carl seems to have gotten the ear-for-language genes that also run in my family; while Eric was amazing us at 4 with his fork sculptures, Carl was astonishing us with his observations and questions about language. Why was one word used, and not another? "I think you meant to say both, not all," he'll tell us. Or he'll point out that two lines in a picture book don't really quite rhyme.

And yet Carl is also a builder. I know that having Lego-obsessed boys is about as common as breathing, but both of my boys have the bug pretty bad, even so.

But many of my friends have heard me talk about this before. What has me thinking about it again is seeing how Yehva fits in. And she does. She loves to do Lego with the boys, and the other day produced something so cool I made the classic parenting blunder of saying, "That's really great! Did somebody help you with it?" (She was offended, as she should have been.) When we toured her preschool last fall, the director commented on Yehva's tendency to gravitate toward technology in every classroom or storage room we entered: the computer, the toy cash-register, the tool bench. It feels like a little spark I want to nurture in her, though really the boys are doing that job for me. I find myself glad she has them, and that they let her tag along sometimes when they've got a project going.

She's only three. Anything could happen. I'm just having fun watching it unfold.

Lego WeDo review

So, Eric likes to make Lego Mindstorms robots. And Carl, who is 6, enjoys noodling around with them, too, but it's a little over his head. So, for Christmas, I got him a Lego WeDo robotics set. We finally got it out to mess around with yesterday (our computer was out of commission for over a week because of a hard drive failure, but we're up and running and measuring our storage in terabytes now, so it's all good).  And we are thrilled with it.

WeDo comes with software; a collection of bricks, motors, and sensors in a reusable storage bin; and a big notebook full of information and instructions. There is also a set of four booklets, each with building instructions for three robots. I remember when we first got Mindstorms, how overwhelmed I felt--I just didn't know how to get started. WeDo, on the other hand, is made for schools, and I joked on Facebook yesterday that they're written like the subtext is, "Dear Elementary School Teacher, we realize it's possible that you just found out that in one hour you have to teach robotics to 27 second-graders, so we're going to make this easy on you." There are simple instructions and handy flowcharts about what to do first and what to do next. I love it.

The WeDo robots are powered by the computer's USB port, so they're always tethered; you're not going to be building a self-playing chess set or a robot that climbs a tree out of this thing. The building style is traditional brick based, so the things you make have that angular old-skool Lego look. (As opposed to Mindstorms, which uses a girder-and-connector style based on Lego Technics. I realize this will be technical blah blah for most of you. But I read a blog post about it recently and am trying to sound like I know more than I do.) But the things you build--two little birds that spin and dance, a sailboat that is tossed on a stormy sea, a clapping monkey--are very cute.

The programming interface is very bright and simple. WeDo has an icon-based graphical programming interface like Mindstorms, but much simplified (GeekDad has a screenshot here). Carl found it very easy to understand and use: you lay down a "start" block, then you can add blocks that run the motor, that play sounds, that act as a timer, and so on. You can have more than one program laid out on the screen at a time, and when you run a program, the block that is running lights up so you can easily connect what the robot is doing to what's in the program.

With Mindstorms, you have to write the program, compile it and download it to the robot's brick, and run it. If it doesn't work, you're back to the computer. It can make the de-bugging stage a bit lengthy. The WeDo interface makes trial-and-error quick and easy; you can write a program, run it, change it, find a bug, fix it, try something else, write a new program, and run it, all in about two minutes.

The trade-off, of course, is that the robots are very limited. You get a USB hub (kind of a little power brick), a motor, a tilt sensor, and a motion sensor. The designers have done a lot with a handful of gears and pulleys, but this is more like a tasty appetizer than a full robotics meal. With Mindstorms, there are a great many idea books, blogs, and websites, but not so with WeDo; at least not that I've found yet. I don't think it's leaked out of the schools market much. I'll be interested to see what Carl does when he's worked through the Activity Pack robots.

The WeDo activities are clearly designed to get kids thinking about how the gears, pulleys, and levers are operating. The interface for each activity starts with a short animated movie about the robot you're going to build, and then, before the building instructions, will say something like, "Our robot uses a motor to turn a small gear. The small gear turns a large gear, which operates a lever." I read it to Carl and he listens politely, but he really wants to get to the part where he can program the funny noises.

I paid an extra $50 or so for the Activity Pack, which has both building and programming instructions for a dozen projects, so the whole schmoo cost about $180, which is pricey (it's actually sold together as a "homeschool" pack now). I agree with some quibbles in GeekDad's review: if the computer didn't have dual monitors, I don't know how I'd have gotten out of the full-screen programming interface, and I still haven't quite figured out how saving programs and re-opening them works. The notebook could use a Quick Reference section; there was no easy way for me to look up how to save a program, for instance.

Still, I feel like we got our money's worth, and Carl has declared it the best Christmas present he ever got. The robots are simple to build and putting together programs is a snap. GeekDad says that you should consider whether you have younger relatives to hand it down to when deciding about the investment, and I admit I have already found myself wondering who among my homeschool pals might like to borrow it when Carl's done.

This is the second time  I've bought something from Lego Education, and I've been pleased both times (the first time I got a set of Simple Machines activity kits), not least because of the little plastic bins everything comes in. Sometimes I browse the Lego Education catalog and think I could build my kids' whole curriculum out of it.