Now that there are so many products out there designed to give kids ways to learn programming and other skills, it’s easy to forget about the days before Arduino or the Raspberry Pi.
In this void of the late 90s, LEGO Mindstorms kits have arriveda robotics line for children with basic elements of robotics theories, how to put pieces together and program actions in an interactive way.
Now, after 24 years, the company will stop manufacturing the Mindstorms line at the end of the year, which is the end of an era.
Mindstorms has its roots in the MIT Media Lab’s Programmable Bricks project, a series of LEGO bricks with microcontrollers and contacts for motors and sensors. The implementation of its Logo programming language was abandoned by LEGO in favor of a graphics system on a mainframe computer.
Since then, the Mindstorms brand name has been used on several iterations of the controller and a whole range of robotics kits.
We believe that Mindstorms will be replaced by better and cheaper single-board computers in 2022, but that doesn’t stop ’90s kids from having their first chance to make a real robot their own way.