2006 – LEGO Mindstorms NXT

Cue the fond memories of the gray and orange NXT robotics kit. Heading back in time, I vividly remember hosting my first robotics summer camp for students when I found out I had access to seven of these kits. This was also the time when I first dipped my toe into the FIRST LEGO League:

Figure 1.2 – LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick

In 2006, LEGO updated the robot line with the NXT. I am sure many of you remember, recognize, or have fond memories of using the NXT. There were two versions of this kit, retail (8527) and educational (9797). Additionally, the kits had an upgrade to NXT 2.0 (8547). More importantly, the programming interface was LabVIEW, which is what many of us grew to love with the NXT and EV3. It was also with this robotic kit that there started to be a huge list of various programming languages made available by third parties if you did not want to use block-based coding.

In 2009, LEGO upgraded this kit with...