Chris Anderson bows the knee to homeschooled Christian kids in “I, for one, welcome our new Christian homeschooled Lego robotics overlords:”

This is a bit off topic, but my fondness for Lego robotics cannot be suppressed. Check out this video of a team of Christian home-schooled 9-14 year olds winning the New Hampshire FIRST Lego League Nano-Quest Challenge in a single autonomous outing. There are so many impressive things going one here that it’s hard to highlight just one, but the fact that the robot changes its own tools is unbelievable.

Ah, that video brings me back to the awkward days of eighth grade Olympics of the Mind (now called something that sounds dumb due to the objections of the International Olympic Committee) and our “Treasure Hunters” problem. It involved no robots, but it did require us to write a program that would automatically plot a path through a large 8×8 grid for two human actors to pick up three treasures each while avoiding three randomly-place hazards. And not walking on the same square twice. Way too hard for 13-year-olds using the programming tools of the day, but good memories were made my Dad, who provided copious programming help.

Seventh grade OM is where I met the girl who would later become my wife. There was no programming that year, although I did manage to get some electronics involved by making some little LED flashers for one of the space circus animals we constructed out of papier maché, chicken wire, wood, and canvas. But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Chris Anderson and Mindstorms. If you’re not familiar with Chris (he’s the editor-in-chief of Wired) and his recent book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, you’d be well served to read his brief introduction to the idea under the heading The Long Tail, In a Nutshell. It’s a compelling economic model that, while not without its critics, seems to do a good job explaining certain distribution models that have arisen in the Internet age.

As for Mindstorms, I’m more and more convinced that I need to part with $250 and get this product into my house. Programmable robots with sensors, for the kids? As I’m fond of saying (not entirely without irony): it’s a wonderful time to be alive.

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• Posted by Tim on Wednesday, December 6, 2006 at 9:47:42 pm PST
• Category: Technology, Culture
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