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copied!<p>I coached a <a href="http://www.usfirst.org/firstlegoleague/community/homepage.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">First Lego League</a> team for a couple of years and we used the NXT robots. The team consisted of 6th, 7th and 8th graders and they were readily able to learn learn the graphical programming environment and to develop some pretty sophisticated programs with it. As coaches we guided them in good software practices (requirements, design, modularity, documentation, testing etc.) but the kids did the work and they learned a lot. The standard NXT software is basically a stripped down version of <a href="http://www.ni.com/labview/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">LabView</a> and it's reasonably easy to use but a bit buggy. That was a good feature for the kids though - they learned the hard way to save their work often because the software can and does crash while you're editing.</p> <p>If you want to have a blast playing with robots and especially if you want to involve kids too, this is a great environment for it. But the standard software is a graphical programming language so you're wiring up and configuring function blocks not writing code and some people don't consider that "real" software. It all depends on what you want to learn. We only used the standard NXT software with the kids because of FLL contest rules.If you prefer using procedural languages the NXT is still a great platform for learning but you'd need to switch to an alternative development environment like one of <a href="http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">these</a>.</p>

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