When the first LEGO Mindstorms building set came out, I enthused, online and in print, that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to grow up with this as your LEGO building set. It seemed so revolutionary at the time. And it was. But that was going-on nine years ago! Its 8-bit technology looks positively Jurassic compared to the tech of today.

The Mindstorms NXT system (mindstorms.lego.com, $250) brings Mindstorms into the 21st century, with a 32-bit ARM7 microcontroller, 256KB of Flash memory, 64KB of RAM, USB and Bluetooth connectivity, both Mac and Windows interfacing, and lots of cool motors and sensors (three servos, ultrasonic sensor, sound sensor, light sensor, touch sensor). And the mechanical components have been rethought to make them less prone to falling apart during active bot-on-bot action.

This kit may seem a bit pricey to parents thinking about getting it for their kids, or if you have some holiday e-gift certificates burning a hole in your inbox, but you might think nothing about spending, say $60, on a lesser robotic toy or $100-200 on a Robosapien or other readymade robot. Think of Mindstorms as a von Neumann machine, a factory for creating robots and other programmable toys or cobble-together gadgets. Given your level of creativity and building skills, there are few limits to what you can do with this kit. There’s a huge online community of Mindstorms builders who share building ideas, program code, sensor hacks and videos on their creations. That’s a lot of value for your money (or at least that’s what you can tell yourself as you’re exchanging the down jacket your mother buys you every year for cash so you can buy something *truly* useful… TOYS!)