Perhaps to the enthusiasts who belittled Bionicle as a terrible plauge to the Brick-building system may find this new smart brick announcement by LEGO cursed?
As for me, how will this play into the return of the glory days of Mindstorms?
They’re so weird they may warrant their own topic…
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how much is a ev3 worth nowdays? i have a near brand new one with the packaging and spare parts
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New and sealed is worth a pretty penny if you can find a buyer, though most people buying EV3 systems these days are either FLL teams or just enthusiasts, who probably aren’t looking to buy a brand-new system. Also, the price varies depending on which version you have - I’m guessing you have the retail edition, with instructions for TRACK3R and EV3RSTORM and those types?
As for Smart Play, I’m mixed on it. On the one hand, it’s very different from what I grew up with - most we ever got was a sound brick that played a single looped noise, like a dog barking or an alien warbling sound. We just made our own sound effects instead…
That being said, I’m sure there will be some way to backdoor some use out of the bricks, like modifying how they interact with the contact points. It’d be very useful to have a small brick that can interface with equally small parts of a build.
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I feel like there’s two angles to look at the Smart Play thing from: adult MOCingbird and kid MOCingbird. Adult MOCingbird thinks it’d be kinda neat to include in just one or two sets, but overall, it would make both sets and minifigs kinda unusable (except for like cyberpunk builds I guess). Plus, I can imagine the extra price Smart Play will likely tack on. From kid MOCingbird’s perspective…I hate it even more. I get this is a pretty subjective take, but something I always liked about LEGO as a kid growing up was how they really were all about using one’s imagination (I never even really liked play features that much). I don’t need a brick to generate lightsaber sound effects: the sounds in my head were probably way cooler anyway. The whole thing honestly reminds me a lot of the light-up lightsaber minifigs they came out with a while ago. Kinda neat, but ultimately reductive and unnecessary, trading in articulation and usability for a light show that will get old quick. But hey, that’s just me.
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At least they have a better function than the Super Mario electronic figures… those just cost way too much for a glorified playsets, and barely do anything without paying extra. Smart Play at least works more similarly to Mindstorms or Power Functions (although the minifigures seem like another gimmick feature that’ll get scrapped after a while, especially if people figure out ways to modify their voice responses)…
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it’s not sealed, but new other wise. unfortunately no instructions. I had the wrong impression of mindstorms when i bought it.
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Mindstorms was my first exposure to programming and I’ve been hooked ever since. Smart Play is being described the same way bitcoin or VR was back when they were new. Even if it does come to fruition, I don’t think Lego is aiming for the same kind of audience that Mindstorms was.
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Could be mildly interesting if there’s a way to program your own sounds and custom reaction patterns. Currently it seems like the smart play system is really limited and expensive for what it is, and I think the novelty will wear off quickly.
Then again, I thought the same about the Mario figures when they launched, and those seem to be very successful with kids.
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Yeah, it’s more like an advanced (and better proportioned) version of the Super Mario sets. I can see some good ways to use it, especially if they ever implemented some more forms of sensors (ie. the ultrasonic distance ones or a color detector).
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I personally think it’s unnecessary
What happened to making your own sounds with your mouth while playing?
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I always got told to shut up when I did that 
now it’s different, now I get told to shut up when I say anything at all 
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The true smart brick Lego is slipping under the radar is this:
Looks like Spike Prime is out. Wireless motors and modules are in and so are AI systems.
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Ah yes, the average “you shouldn’t learn the way that proved right for 60+ years because we don’t want to maybe change our test standards” argument… why no one in education gets this is beyond me. Teaching the test wouldn’t be a problem if they just fixed the testing standards to not demand high grades on tests that don’t properly demonstrate skills.
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Lego needs to stop with the electronics gimmicks.
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You’re misinterpreting; this is exactly what Lego is trying to fix. The point of that graphic is to show that teachers dislike the “traditional” teaching methods. Lego is marketing a “critical thinking first” approach with the new Education system, promoting it as an appealing alternative to the “traditional” methods of teaching computer science.
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Thing is, I’m a CS student. The “traditional” methods are addressing the ways students are supposed to go about learning the logic used in code. The way most people are interpreting this is that you’re given a test of your skills where you make exactly what the professor wants, down to the structure and punctuation. You’re supposed to memorize algorithms and constructs to regurgitate in the workplace.
But beyond the basic courses, that’s not what they do. They expect you to come up with your own solutions to assignments based on the knowledge you have, and this reinforces your knowledge because you’re actually applying what you learned. The problem is that the way AI is applied here in college is that it’s not used as a supplement, to reinforce what students learn. Mostly, it’s students pasting assignments into ChatGPT to bypass the work of completing a program. Sure, it shows them some stuff they needed to learn, but the knowledge isn’t retained.
I’ve done this myself, and I can’t tell you how many assignments I remember nothing from, because I never went through the process of figuring out the basics of setting up the programming logic. If the AI use isn’t constrained to something like Autopilot in VSCode, then it’s far too easy to use to get out of working, and then you can’t even figure out how your own code works.
If I’d done things the “traditional” way, I would be like the top honors students instead of only having middling code knowledge and about 4 GitHub projects.
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So your problem is the AI? If that’s the case, then I definitely agree that having any kind of in-built “AI programmer” would be a disaster.
However, right now, I don’t see a need to worry about that. Obviously there’s still a lot of details yet to come, but from what’s available on Lego’s site, the only AI implementation I’ve seen so far is in vision detection:
The programming is still block-based, with blocks that look very similar to that of Spike and older Mindstorms generations:
Now, if there does turn out to be an “AI coding” feature, then yeah, that’s a problem. Hopefully the promised AI Literacy courses will discourage that:
If we take Lego’s marketing at face value (and I know that some people will accept that easier than others), it sounds like these “lesson plans” will be geared specifically towards making kids think for themselves, meaning no AI-generated solutions and no “do it this exact way or else”. When Lego says they want to turn away from the “traditional methods”, I’m pretty sure that’s referring to the memorization/regurgitation that you mentioned in your first paragraph above, not the proper problem solving that you mentioned in the second.
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Ok, that makes sense. Thanks for the correction.
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i don’t think so. lego seems to be going all in on ai, like every other company.
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