Lego kit builds better ‘bots. Robot competitions a great way to encourage students to get involved in science and math.

It’s fun when a collection of plastic parts seems to have personality.

I put together a robot with Lego’s new Mindstorms NXT kit, set it on the kitchen floor, and watched it trundle forward on its rubber wheels till it sensed an obstacle (a cabinet). It backed up, swung left, then proceeded on its new course, till it sensed the next impediment.

"It’s like a little man!" said my girlfriend.

That’s the charm of robotics — seeing something of ourselves, however basic, in an inanimate object.

Most robot toys, however, are designed to do only one or a couple of things, and get boring quickly. Their charm often doesn’t outlive the first set of batteries.

The Lego Mindstorms kit, which first appeared in 1998, is different. It lets you design and build a wide variety of robots.

Enthusiasts, many of them adults, have used it to build robots that sort Lego bricks by color, dispense soft drinks, or climb stairs. One Dane even turned it into a low-resolution scanner that took 3 to 4 hours to scan a CD cover.

By Peter Svensson, Associated Press

Full Story: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2006-07-26-lego-mindstorms_x.htm

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