The Goldfish Chronicles

The other week I took the plunge and bought Lego Mindstorms. Thereupon it sat on the table for a couple of weeks until I finally got around to picking up some rechargeable batteries. Friday night we built the robot, and on Saturday we discovered the act of programming said robot to do some basic tasks.

Nathan was very impressed by the concept, but obviously it’s a toy for me. It’ll be a while before he groks the concepts involved. My thesis was on computing and education, and while I did a terrible job at that (average code, with hindsight, and poor research), said thesis sparked an interest in me for the ideas of how computing improves education.  I was lucky enough to be a part of the 80’s BBC + Logo/Turtle push in the UK and it’s one of the parts of my primary education that stand out in my and my peers’ memories. Another was raising the Mary Rose - an educational ‘game’ in which we painstakingly dug out the Mary Rose and cataloged our finds.

Hopefully I can keep up the Mindstorms energy and have a good play. Lego recently offered up a Tie-Fighter Tank from the Star Wars Expanded Universe - it’d be cool to take one of the Tie-Fighters I have, mix that with the Mindstorms and have a little Tieby that runs around on the floor doing dumb things.

Even better would be to have a robot with multiple CPUs trying to work together. Given that the future is about event driven multi party systems, having multiple mindstorms seems like an educational thing for the lad.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Family etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.