Digital construction toy, Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit by Lego, designed 2009, ABS plastic and electronic components

The acquisition is of a complete Lego Mindstorms NXT, it includes:

• 610 Lego pieces: broken down by type in R/F,
• 7 cables of various lengths,
• The Intelligent Brick,
• An instruction leaflet,
• A ‘test pad’ poster,
• An unused set of stickers and,
• A CD containing the Mindstorms programming software.

Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 is a construction toy and accompanying software first released in 2006. Using Lego Mindstorms, users build a machine from Lego pieces, connect the machine to a computer, and use the Mindstorms software to write a programme to control the machine using a basic visual programming language.

The kit comprises of around 610 pieces, comprising of traditional Lego pieces and some specially created pieces such as gears, pulleys, motors and sensors. The kit also contains the NXT ‘Intelligent Brick’: a module containing a battery and board which acts as an interface between the machine and the programming software. The Lego machine can be built in any project: a robot, a car, a rubix cube solver or a vending machine. Once constructed, the user connects their machine to a computer using a USB interface cable and writes a computer programme to control it using the software provided.

The concept for Lego Mindstorms was first developed in 1985 as an independent collaboration between Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick and Stephen Ocko. Building on the principles of Papert’s Logo Turtle, the collaboration intended to create an educational kit that allowed learners to design both the movement programme and the machine that used it. It was hoped that the ability to design both elements of the project would allow users to engage in experimentation and iterative design, changing one variable at a time to achieve a working machine.

Soon after, the project was picked up by Lego, who sponsored the project and moved the work to the MIT Media Lab. Here the LEGO/Logo programming language was developed, a development of the Logo programming language used by Papert’s Logo Turtle. The LEGO/Logo language added 20 new words such as ‘on’ and ‘off’ for controlling motors and lights and words like ‘sensor?’ to take information from the Lego sensors. This phase of the project also worked on the development of the development of the ‘Intelligent Brick’: a module containing a battery and board which could allow the machine to move independently of any wires. The project was tested in schools but was never released commercially due to the lack of homes owning a personal computer.

The first official generation of Lego Mindstorms, the ‘Robotics Invention System’ was released commercially over a decade later in 1998. The name Mindstorms was chosen to reference Papert’s book on educational constructivism and digital skills. The kit followed the principles and technology of the original LEGO/Logo project, with two key changes. The ‘Intelligent Brick’ was redesigned to be cheaper and sturdier, and the robot was programmed using a visual programming language (rather than the Logo textual language).

Mindstorms NXT, the second generation of Lego Mindstorms, was released in 2006. An updated version, Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 (the version we have acquired), was released in 2009 which added a sensor that could read colours . The third generation of Mindstorms, Lego Mindstorms EV3, was released in 2013.

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