My daughter loves LEGO, maybe their creative toolbox will encourage her to code

I am hoping the LEGO Boost creative toolbox will pair one hobby my kid loves with another she doesn't yet have.

My child builds LEGO as if she were Zach the maniac of old. We have a very large collection of Star Wars and some Ninjago LEGO sets. Slowly she has taken over every bookshelf I'll let her. She loves to build LEGO. Maybe this set will also teach her to code.

I used to play with Mindstorms. I just saw my two OG sets with a few expansion packs, as I cleaned out a basement and packed things into storage. This I hope this set brings her as much fun as those did for me back in the 90s. Boost seems to be the modern evolution of Mindstorms.

My friends and I used to build LEGO Mindstorms robots and pitch them against one another on a conference room table, late at night at our Dotcom-era start-up. The idea was to throw the other person's robot off the table. We'd devise all manner of sticking ourselves to the table, or prying, bashing, smashing and disassembling the opposing Mindstorm. People got frustrated after a few sessions as the robots took hours of assembly and moments to become LEGO pieces once again.

This set is more structured than I remember Mindstorms as being. This 847 piece set has instructions to make Vinnie, a dancing and guitar playing robot, Frankie the robo-cat, a working guitar and some other things I can't quite identify. Coding occurs via an IOS, Android and Windows app. Read the rest