LEGO Mindstorm?
 

My son and daughter both want to learn about robots. One of their friends does LEGO robots with his dad. I'm thinking about getting a LEGO Mindstorm kit and making something for them. Is anyone here into Mindstorm? Is it reasonably easy to program?

definitely go with the mindstorms... I played around with them in high school, and it was a lot of fun. They're pretty easy to program and there are all kinds of fun add-on modules you can get.

We had some here for the "robots" exhibit , very cool and easy/fun to play with. Heck I was thinking of getting one for myself to play with :D
They have online support which is nice, when the computer they sent out with the show crashed I downloaded the software and installed it on one of our clunker computers we had kicking around the shop.

Look at the Vex robotics kits. Available at sale pricing from Radio shack now.

What are your kids ages?

Mindstorms all the way... they're even open-sourcing their programming this year.

There is a HUGE following to these things, and tons of support to be had.


$0.02

Your better off with Mindstorm, but I have built robots based on OOPIC controllers. Pretty simple because you can code in C, VB, JAVA...whatever floats your boat.

http://www.networkoracle.com/walkinghexapod.htm

Movie-10MB
http://www.networkoracle.com/roboapproach.MPG


Resources:
http://www.acroname.com
http://www.lynxmotion.com

There are a number of biped robots on the market these days that are just amazing. Do a search on Robonova and Kondo Robot. Expensive ($1000-1500), but SO cool.

too bad Fischer Technic isn't available here in the US

My son Daniel has a ton of Mindstorms. One of our friends worked on the Mindstorm project for Lego and he gave my son about 50lbs of Lego Mindstorm hardware after the project was over. That was about 4 years ago and Dan was 10. He was able to figure everything out and had a great time making robots and "programming them". They are not cheap, but you can get them on eBay. We will keep ours and someday drag them out again on a snowy Michigan Sunday and create some cool stuff...