When comparing Lego Mindstorms vs Lightbot, the Slant community recommends Lego Mindstorms for most people. In the question“What are the best books or programs for teaching kids to code?” Lego Mindstorms is ranked 4th while Lightbot is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Lego Mindstorms is:
There are many sensors available, such as infrared, video, sonar, gyros, accelerometers, controllers, and more.
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Pros
Pro Lots of sensors to provide input
There are many sensors available, such as infrared, video, sonar, gyros, accelerometers, controllers, and more.
Pro Control real world objects
Children are encouraged by seeing their programming efforts doing something in action, and having the result command a robot is a very tangible way of showing the outcomes of their programs.
Pro Support for multiple programming languages
There are many enthusiast projects for accessing the mindstorms API over Bluetooth to allow you to use any programming language of your choice, allowing for advancing students to graduate to more advanced languages while still controlling something familiar.
Pro Simple drag and drop interface
Mindstorms has an intuitive visual programming interface with digital previews of actions to make programming easy for beginners. The visual programming interface allows for actions, control flow, sensors, data manipulation and more.
Pro Works multi-platform
Runs on iOS, Android and Windows.
Cons
Con Expensive
The base mindstorms kit costs $350 and additional sensor components range from $20 - $50 each.
Con Windows requires flash
Flash should probably not be installed on your system if you enjoy a safe, virus-free system. Though the Chrome browser uses their own Flash fork which is safe to use being that the browser is constantly updated for security.