Recmmendations for introduction to kids

[warlock40]

Hi All,

Recently my Son has been showing a great deal of interest in building and wanting to animate things.
He’s 8, but is way ahead of where I was at that age. Last year we started with the elenco electronic experiment kits, and they have been a hit, however…this of course has moved to taking things apart, using motors, lights and other things to reanimate or add to his lego / building products. We’ve been using wood and other things but he has expressed an interest in adding some motors to a couple of our wood projects (such as this one ep.yimg.com/ca/I/woodstore_2135_17258432).

Over a month ago I hit the internet to do some research in preparation for Christmas. I was originally looking at Meccano as a mechanical starting point. I was interested in introducing him to electric motor control, and implementing them into whatever he wanted to build. Meccano has come a long way from my days, and I was overwhelmed at their site.

What I want to do though it introduce him to electric motors/servo, gearing, power and control. I’m looking for something which we can learn about controlling motors through power and gearing, and assemble into something which can be controlled (manually or RF/IR)

I was going to start with something simple like basic platform that we can build on.
Meccano will certainly do for the construction phase, but I’m wondering if anyone could recommend a better starting point.

On the topic of Mindstorm… I was blown away to see what they have come up with.
I think this may be a little over his head at this age, but for a daddy toy… hmmmm… can this be purchased now. I see the site says January 2011… but lego’s site has it available?..

I’m sure you get these questions a great deal and I appreciate any advice.

Thanks

[warlock40]

Thanks for the reply… Vex looks very meccano like… I think this would be a great starting point.
I was looking at the dual control starter kit. Seemed like the best value for the money, however I’m not familiar with the programming software.

As far as the software goes. Are all of these PIC based? and if so can any C compiler do the trick?.. or is the software the programming software too?

[cbenson]

Hi Warlock40,

VEX comes with either the PIC (lower level) or Cortex (higher level) microcontrollers. Both can use one of three software programs directly: easyC (graphical user interface with large icons, similar to LEGO Minstorms), RobotC (text-based code but easier to work with than normal programming) and MPLab (very similar to C). Since all of these programs are based in C, you can certainly program it in C as well, though there is less support. You can download a 30-day trial of RobotC to experiment with it.

Hope this helps,

[carlitos]

Hi warlock40 and welcome to the RobotShop Community forum.

The Lego Mindstorms will indeed be out of stock until January 2011 unfortunately.

If you are looking for a construction set similar to Meccano, then you might want to have a look at Vex kits.

You could start with a basic Radio Control kit, and then make it evolve as much as you want bu purchasing either other kits or individual parts.

These kits are usually found in classrooms and are very good for learning. Based on your message and the gorgeous wooden tractor you built, I guess your child and you would appreciate the challenge.