LEGO robotics are a versatile platform for building interactive creations, but the documentation supplied by LEGO tends to be lacking. When purchasing the LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit, the user downloads software that gives instructions on how to build and program five different robots, but doesn’t teach how to design unique robots or program them. The LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Activity Book by Daniele Benedettelli fills that need while showing how to build seven unique creations.
The first chapter of The LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Activity Book is an introduction to the LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit. The short chapter is the introduction that is missing from the LEGO kit itself, introducing the ideas of the parts that come in the kit (a full list is inside the front cover) and what they do.
Once the reader is introduced to the robotics kit, they are led through a project based learning experience. Each chapter introduces a new project that expands the knowledge learned in the previous activity, and not all of the creations in the book are what would be considered traditional robots. The seven works created and programmed in the book are: baseball batter, the gobbler, SARKIAP-1 the transformer, shelly the turtle, whac-a-mole!, pinball, and guitar.
One of the great things about the projects in The LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Activity Book is the interactivity of the individual creations. Rather than be walking or driving robots, each project interacts with its environment or its user to perform an action. The batter reacts and bats a ball, gobbler chews up paper, SARKIAP-1 moves around and transforms between forms, shelly the turtle moves around and retracts its head, and whac-a-mole!, pinball, and guitar are all interactive and playable.
In addition to learning to build the projects, the reader is taught how to program in Scratch. Scratch has become the most popular language to teach programming concepts to beginners and by utilizing robots to learn the language, it incentivizes a new programmer to learn the language in order to see the robots act and react in the real world.
The LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Activity Book is the missing manual for the LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit. Anyone starting out who wants to learn to build robots needs to start out with this book to learn to build interactive robots.
