[px43]

Bummer, I feel like Mindstorms landed right in that gap for me where I was a bit too old for them when they first came out (in high school, already having a blast with web programming), and now I have a two year old who builds giant Duplo castles, has conversations with our household robots, wears robot pajamas, and I'm super excited for them to age into robotics toys.

This SPIKE Prime thing seems neat, but as others have mentioned, a bit bland. Hopefully LEGO comes out with some rad space robot themed sets at some point.

Does anyone know if LEGO has or is working on some sort of Minecraft style environment where you can build cool stuff, and then develop the programs and run them in the simulated environment? Then maybe you can build the machines IRL and run the same code to get the same behavior? Even a single player simulator would be pretty neat, though multiplayer would be ideal. Maybe what I'm hoping for is something like a MuJoCo for kids, and it seems like LEGO would be a perfect match to have a product like that.

[askiiart]

Well there's Arduino simulators, and Minecraft education has multiple options for coding (blocks or JavaScript). I don't know about any Lego robot-style simulations, though.