[hansvm]

That was easily some of the best bang-for-their-buck my parents ever got. LEGO Mindstorms would keep me quiet and out of trouble for days at a time.

I'm not certain how much that influenced my interest in software engineering though, or even if it made learning traditional programming easier. I later had a few c++ courses in high school, and as I recall most of my struggles were with syntax errors (not discounting those in the slightest because I made a _ton_ of them) and whatnot rather than some kind of broken control flow, and I remember that not being the case for all but two of my classmates, so it does seem plausible that some of the Mindstorm lessons stuck around or shaped how I think about such things.