Customer Reviews

Advanced NXT: The Da Vinci Inventions Book (Technology in Action)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Just the idea behind this book makes it worth purchasing. Taking the ideas of one of the greatest minds in history and applying it to a brilliant robotic platform is genius. Relating the robots to Da Vinci's designs is a great learning experience for old and young. My 8 year-old is becoming quite a fan of Leonardo due to the use of this book.

The bots in the book are great, and the potential for extensibility is even greater. There are quite a few new NXT books out this year and this is definitely one of best especially if you are interested in tying the evolution of physics and mechanization to modern technology.

I highly recommend this book. If you are running a Lego Mindstorms team or teaching robotics using the NXT platform, do yourself a favor and pick up this book, it's a great way to enhance your curriculum.

I have enjoyed many of the books in this series, but was severely disappointed when I got this one. The ideas are great - and would be really useful to my students, if the pictures that accompanied them were in any way able to be seen clearly. I tried and failed to build several of the models after my students all expressed frustration at trying to figure out what was being portrayed.

There are some great ideas in this book but the pictures for construction are not that clear, with pieces hidden behind other pieces. Directions are for the more advanced of Lego's Robot builders. If you already know what you are doing, you can jump right in and go to it. For the novice or the beginner its next to impossible. I love the Da Vinci connection but clean up the photographs so that more people can take advantage of the idea.

The pictures are horrible - even with a magnifying glass its very difficult to follow. This turns what should be a valuable learning experience into increasing frustration for the young engineer. Thumbs very down. The author deserved better schematic support!

This book was great, I use it as a resource when teaching robotics.the book is kid friendly (9-14) and they enjoy using it as a source.

I was really looking forward to this book, and when I got it I enjoyed reading it. The problem is I can't build any of the projects. Each needs very many regular Lego pieces so if were not heavily into Lego as a kid you are out of luck. I priced the cost of the Lego bits ala carte for the simplest project, the revolving bridge, and it would be about $20. And not just that. Each project requires more axels and pulleys and gears that come with the NXT set. So unless you have a bunch of friends that also have NXT you are out of luck. So I am very disapointed. I wish they had put the hardware requirements on the cover and I would have saved my money.

I haven't used the book yet, but as I flipped through, I was disappointed by the quality of the assembly schematic reproductions. I'm not sure we will be able to follow them.

I was shocked that the projects required additional parts not included with the basic NXT kit. I was looking for something my students could build with what we have - the basic kit. School systems are not full of extra $$ for additional parts so we need projects that we can do with 1 kit.

I bought this book second hand from Amazon.com (At $4 so you cant go wrong!!)

I gave it a 3 star - and that pretty much sums up how I felt about the book. The other reviews here picked up many of the problems I found.

Stan