[chbot] Which robot kit?

[Charles Manning]

Andrew

Well as expected you have received a lot of suggestions from many people - 
some of which are pretty much plugs for product they sell or are very closely 
linked to.

I think the most important thing to do is determine the scope of what you want 
to achieve and how far you want to go.

If you just want something for a class of 15 yo with the scope of just a 
single semester/year then you probably just want something that is really 
easy to program and there is no need to worry about the extensibility.

If, however, you are looking for a platform that is extensible and has legs 
for further teaching then you need a different platform.

The propeller and VEX platforms, and many others, run their own programming 
languages (BASIC, Propeller SPIN, RobotC or whatever) and not real C or any 
other portable programming language. This is mainly due the the limitations 
of the micros they use (Propeller or PIC or whatever).

AVR/Arduino is probably the least capable micro that has the ability to run 
portable code (C/C++). ARM micros are more capable and can run a wider range 
of portable languages (eg. Java).

That last reason is why the Lego Mindstoms has been used so widely. At the 
bottom end, young schoolkids can program in the graphical UI. At the top end, 
Stanford University (and others) run Java on the Lego Mindstorms and, over 
the years, have built up some well engineered and portable Java robotics 
libraries that they use on Lego and on other platforms. One of the Japanese 
universities has done something similar but using TRON (a portable RTOS much 
favoured in Japan).

I expect you're really interested in just providing something easy to use and 
with limited scope.

-- Charles