I got a second hand Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System this week. My 8 year old son is working his way through the computer led training 'missions' and absolutely loving it. He's been Lego crazy for years but this is taking things to a whole new level. I don't know if he'll develop an interest in programming but it does seem an excellent tool for getting started in that line. Putting a program together is easy and the feedback is immediate and concrete. We 'debugged' his first problem together after the robot didn't behave as he expected. Then we sat back and watched the robot explore it's environment.
One thing I'm not enjoying is that the PC software requires Windows. The USB driver has caused some pain and I'm getting heartily sick of the frequent reboots. Apparently MacOS software is planned for the newer kits, but there's no obvious plan to support Linux.
