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Looks like someone did launch it again on a more modern platform... :)

http://www.mindrover.com/

Model rockets are still pretty amazing, and pretty cheap. Just keep the engines until you're ready to use them. I would have killed for a radio controlled helicopter as a kid, and they're darned affordable these days.

For video games, Mindrover is still a programming and logic classic.

I think you're thinking of MindRover.

Although the game has a surprisingly loyal fan-base, CogniToy's MindRover definitely showing its age. The original version was a product of the 90's right about the time when BattleBots and Robot Wars were starting to gain notice here in the U.S.

What really set this game apart from the crowd though, was that you could actually construct full-fledged autonomous vehicles with fairly sophisticated AIs and weapons, all without writing any code. Instead, you were presented with a number of Lego MindStorms-like sensors / motors, which you'd then wire into a complex system of visual logic gates similar to drawing a program flow-chart.

While the game was presented in 3D, most of the actual game was limited to 2D movements and input.

Eventually though, I'd like to see a modernized version of MindRover that truly expands into the complex nature of a fully-realized 3D world, allowing for much more challenging AI development. Perhaps it could also include modes where an AI can be designed to assist within a manual control scheme.

There's a demo available online, I recommend at least trying it out: http://www.mindrover.com/

Oh, and there's a Linux version too.

MindRover comes to mind. http://www.mindrover.com/

At a brief glance, Scratch looks like it's generally aimed at a young and inexperienced audience. For kids who graduate from that and want to try out some more advanced concepts, take a look at the game MindRover. I first ran across it because it was tagged as the spiritual successor to my beloved old Robot Odyssey. (How many of us cut our teeth on that one?) MindRover doesn't directly teach object-oriented programming, but it takes little insight for an educator to relate one to the other, giving young learners that much-needed concrete example to help them grasp OOP's trickier concepts.

How about more of the weirder style games where you exert some type of physical control over characters, enemies and the environment itself, rather than focusing gameplay on controlling a single character directly? Sure, you got stuff like Super Monkey Ball and Rocket Slime out there already, but this is only scratching the surface of what the DS is capable of. For example, imagine some type of RTS game where the playfield has elasticity properties the player can alter during gameplay. certain areas could have sudden elevation changes, rippling effects, twisting, pinching or other oddities that could alter progress.

Or how about games that allow the user to create their own objects with adjustable properties, or construct an object from a large number of preset parts, similar to Mind Rover: The Europa Project.

The bottom line: we need more games that force you to think outside of the box, and not just for purposes of speed or button mashing. The DS has so much untapped potential, it's not even funny.

I'd guess that scripting your team is a lot more strategic than simply responding to stimulous during a battle, and probably a lot more interesting. Sure it may break down to a question of who casts cure on the guy who is at 30% health, but that kind of planning is the strategic element of RPGs. Now it has been distilled in a unique package.

I'm utterly excited about this. I haven't bought the last 4 Final Fantasies, but I'll buy this one. I can only hope it lives up to the promise of being the Final Fantasy for mind rover players. Even if it is as simple as Y's walk-through-em-to-instantly-fight model, at least that cuts out the weakest part of an RPG.

BTW, if you want more action oriented FF, try Secret of Mana for the SNES. This was a sequal to a Game Boy zelda clone, which happens to be the only 3 player action RPG out there (you get the second and third characters several hours into the game). Likewise, Crystalis was one of the last SNK titles for the NES, and it too is absolutely amazing.

MindRover is a PC game where you design the AIs and let them compete.

And before that there were Omega and Carnage Heart (Playstation).

None of those were "learning" games, though.

Galapagos, for the PC, was a game where you had to train an object to navigate challenging terrain. Negative reinforcement came from both the user and from "losing". It was *wayyy* too easy to cause your robotic bug to stand quivering at the edge of a cliff, unable to decide to move anywhere.

After reading up on the $299 starter kit, I'm actually tempted to buy one. Compared to the aging Lego MindStorms kit, the extra $100 cost is worth it just for the radio controller alone.

Near as I can tell, this kit tries to recreate a user experience similar to that found in the game, MindRover, but with a more hands-on approach.

Has anyone here actually used a Vex kit? I'm very curious about the learning curve and any recommendations on purchasing add-on parts. (The starter kit is good, but somewhat limited.)

I liked the idea so much I went out and built a game around it -- MindRover (http://www.mindrover.com/) where players constructed robots using purely visual programming techniques (no text-based code at all). It worked, and it was great for a game, but it made for a cumbersome development process. It's hard to look at an image and see everything you need to see.

Visual programming is cool and fun. It makes the learning curve for programming a little flatter, and it can be a nice way to prototype stuff and get the early versions of an application running. But using it to build apps that are more than toys is a much bigger challenge, and I haven't seen anyone yet who has done it effectively. The original poster's research looks an awful lot like a demo I saw at MIT Media Lab about 5 years ago. IMO, it exposes a bit too much of the syntax of conditionals and things in the visual UI. It's not far enough from textual programming to be helpful.

Bring a copy of Mindrover! Familiarize yourself with ICE first, and download some rovers.
Not only could the studens program the rovers, they could wire them using the built-in system.
You might be able to find Mindriver in some ancient bargain bins, or you'll be able to order it from Cognitoy.
I played this and thought about it all the time during elementary, and I'm a coder now, so who knows? ;)

Short of that, get a copy of something like Unreal Tournament 2k4 and show them how to build a level and make a weapon or something.


Just remember, even if 'you' aren't only coding, doesn't mean you aren't a software engineer. Be creative, they'll surprise you.

Teach them something they can at least think of using to their enjoyment, and they probably will.

There are certain aspects of technology and programming that are akin to natural languages, and a person's ability to pick up languages is at its peak around at around 4 years of age. I'd say teach them as much about controlling / programming computers as you can.

While I would love to emphasize the printed word for research purposes, let's be honest: they're never going to use the dewey decimal card box system. Yes, give them books. Even more important than that, read to them and with them. Take them to the theater, the park, the zoo, the library, and on trips. Teach them to assemble and dissasemble electronics, wood, etc. Teach them to sew. But definitely teach them to program. We would be living in a far more advanced world if everyone knew how to script with the same intimacy that everyone knows how to talk. While they may not have the background in mathematics to create a program which calculates PI to arbitrary precision, it isn't hard to code up something that makes a star dance under the pointer. Or to make a birthday announce website for their friends. Or a script which runs when they login that blows up the screen. Use external librarys for the difficult stuff.

Keep them the hell away from television. They'll get enough of that through other sources anyway. As for games, be very choosey. If you aren't a gaming guru, try to find one with an background in educational gaming. Might I suggest MindRover? Sim City is also great, and will pay for itself a thousand times over when your kids go to college and get credit cards.

A slightly more economical alternative is MindRover, a "3D strategy/programming game" where you program robots and have them battle each other and solve mazes in a 3D world. It has a native Linux port, too!

This is quite a nice visual program. The idea is to build a brain to "run" a bug. Nice educational tool....

Bugbrain was great, and Mindrover was one along similar lines. I wish we'd see more neural-net based stuff these days.

Papyrus Studios and Impressions Games are both Boston-area studios... While their closures come amidst the opening (at least publically) of Tilted Mill and Turbine's major expansion push, you just can't help but feel that this developer's region is again being pinched out by the larger west-coast developers. When Looking Glass closed, it was a blow felt across the region, one that was delt not because Looking Glass was unworthy, but because the publisher felt the region was unworthy. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as every team out here benefits in some way or another from a lot of experienced Looking Glass people, but why was that studio closed? Why did one of the most successful game developers get canned? Why did no white knight show up?

This isn't such a clear-cut case of the expendability of your north-west studios. Papayrus has been frozen with Nascar for years, and losing that license meant losing their company. Impression games was stuck too, stuck making Caeser and other historical strategy games in a saturated market. I don't think the closure of either of these studios comes as a surprise to anybody. But one can't shake the feeling that we're in for another round of publisher abuse, looking at their North East studios as if they were expendable, despite having produced Asheron's Call, Karaoke Revolution, System Shock II, Empire Earth, Neverwinter Nights, Thief 1 and 2, The great Mind Rover, etc, etc.

There was this book mentioned on slashdot a while back. It seems like a sensible approach.

Or perhaps something like Mindrover.

I wouldn't be too worried about giving her something too childish, though. Most people have an immediate reaction when they're introduced to programming - for whatever reason some people's minds are well-suited to it, and it just seems like a natual and obvious way to talk to a computer. Others consider it boring and tedious. It's definitely not a matter of being smarter or anything, certainly some of the most brilliant people I know positively hate computers.

Anyways, I would think you'd be find with any of the "classic" beginner languages. And Logo's sort of fun, even for an adult.

This is one of the smartest "games" I have ever played. Definitely not for everyone, although I think many here at /. would find it interesting. I don't think I've seen it mentioned here before.

Here is the link: mindrover.com

A few years back CogniToy came out with a really unique robot design/combat game called MindRover:The Europa Project. You would start with a simple chase (tank, car, or hovercraft) and outfit it with weapons, sensors, and propulsion. However, the real meat of the game was in the programmer's window. Each piece of equipment had to be wired together with a network of logic gates in order to get the robot to anything meaningful. If your radar sensed an enemy robot, you could signal the weapons to fire or just ram him at full speed. If the radar sensed enemy fire you could signal the motor to move in reverse and fire your own weapons to try to intercept. The smarter the bot, more complex the logic network had to be. The development capital seemed to have dried up for them as well since MindRover was their one and only product of interest.

You know, there are great games out there that teach programming, there are ones that teach Java (Robocode), critical problem solving (Mindrover) and (Roboforge), and you can find games that use their own, c++ - like languages (Colobot), and you can even find games that allow you to compete by writing assemly-like code: (Robocom) .

Jagged Alliance II --- Strategy? Simulation? You have management (limited cash, generate more cash by liberating mines, manage weapons and ammo, supply train, your mercenaries, etc). You have some strategy (which area to attack next?). You have puzzles (how to build a barrel attachment?) But in the main part you have round based tactical combat.

Or what about breakout & co? Tron? Snake? Space Invaders? Loderunner, Pitfall Harry, ... (Jump and Run)?

Or how about Uplink?

Lets add armor and weapons to these things and we got autonomous robot wars! Personally, I've always wished that those robot-battle type shows on tv were autonomous instead of remote controlled. Now THAT would be a challenge.

If you're short of spare parts, you could do worse than muck around with a virtual equivalent.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

CogniToy has a game that simulates the programming of these robots. They have a small web based demo Here If you go to their main page you can get more details on the full game

Haven't played it in a while, but Mind Rover from CogniToy is pretty sweet.

You are a researcher on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. In your free time you re-program the rovers to race around the hallways, battle it out with mini lasers and rocket launchers, and find their way through mazes.

Their online store sells it for $25 but you could probably find it for less. Available in Windows and Linux versions.

Mod parent up, or at least follow the link. This looks like a great game.

For the builders at heart, check out MindRover by CogniToy. Given a set of parts, you build a little robotic vehicle to compete in various sporting and dueling activities. At the core of the game is modern AI and robotics theory, layered with some idealized virtual hardware to smooth over the "unfun" aspects of building a real robot. It's tons of fun to have competitions with your friends' robots!

If you want programmable robot destruction, check out Mind Rover. It's a pretty cool game from a very small software company, comes with a great manual, and they let (hell, encourage) you hack the crap out of it.

There are a bunch of good Linux games, but I think I have to go with MindRover being the absolute coolest, most original, most FUN game I've yet seen on Linux... (The all-time winner of that award in my book would be "The Incredible Machine", but unfortunately there's no Linux version of it or any of its sequels, yet...) If you like coding, you'll probably love MindRover... If you like BattleBots, you'll probably love MindRover... You basically build and program your own robotic vehicles to compete in a variety of missions... It's extremely cool... Check it out: The main site, and Loki's product page...

Check out MindRover

However, in this particular case, the 3c509 driver is BROKEN and requires you to reboot. There were similar driver nuisances with earlier Linux versions, too - ever hear from someone who had to boot DOS and initialize their soundcard before Linux would use it? Driver support can be a royal PITA.

Also, BeOS is a LOT closer to Linux than Windows. Don't let the Evil Corporate Backing scare you off. The OS isn't opensource but it's very opensource friendly - half the utilities are GNU and Be has opensourced some of the UI. Frankly, I consider it being like Linux with a much better user interface, much easier hardware configuration (no work is hard to beat) and a tighter architecture. The downsides are some difficulties porting Unix code that depends on a couple things like mmap() or sockets-as-files and a much weaker network subsystem. (Of course, Linux's network code makes most other operating systems look bad, too.)