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Review on LEGO MINDSTORMS 31313 Educational Programming by Jack Herrera

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Great set with great learning opportunities

We have tons of Lego sets so we're already Lego fans in my family. Once you've built enough castles, pirate ships, and forts, the models are either removed or dusted off. I bought a used Mindstorms RCX kit 8 or 9 years ago and it was too much hassle with an IR tower and a Windows XP work computer. My oldest son really wasn't interested after working with NXT at school as part of the robotics team. He was one of the main players in the team, who knew how to make it work in the decisive moments of the competition, but robotics was too boring for him. This Christmas I bought my youngest son an EV3. He was on the Vex team last year as a sixth year. I was hoping to do more alone as the VEX team is not together this year. By the way, I participated in FLL as a parent when my eldest son was in high school and we competed with his team. in Legoland. I went to the Vex tournament last year and found FLL to be better in the Intermediate age group. The format was better and the kids were really proud to be able to compete at LegoLand. Let's go back to the present moment. My son quickly put together the pair of robots pictured on the box and the set was delayed until last week. We have many competing activities, so the goal was to find projects that would pique his interest. We found the Mindcub3r Rubik's Cube Solving Robot. This project was really fun and my son got interested in the set again. For us, the project was a montage of medium complexity. Only parts from set 31313 were used. Everyone who saw this robot was amazed and asked to take it to school. Head over to your home store and buy a large trash can or maybe even a DeWalt DWST14825 here at Revain. It's easier to keep all the Lego pieces sorted. Before you buy a trash can organizer, you just need to make sure it has a compartment that fits the EV3 computer. You really need to go online and look for other designs and information as what's in the box is good but limited. We bought the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Discovery Book and my son is looking forward to taking apart the Rubik's Cube robot we built and starting to work on the workbook. Both the Rubik's Cube robot and the workbook projects only require the 31313 set. $350 seems like a good change to put something like this away, they sell well on eBay if they don't resonate with your kids but I think , like parents , you should also participate. I recommend buying a workbook. I went through the tutorial and it has useful information and good teaching points. Starting tomorrow we will start working on workbooks, so I will update this review in the future.

Pros
  • New
Cons
  • I don't really like anything, everything is great