LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT One-Kit Wonders: Ten Inventions to Spark Your Imagination Paperback – November 29, 2008

I own the first Idea book, the Inventor's Guide and I pre-ordered the One-Kit Wonders book, which arrived a week ago. Its projects are probably the best of the 3 books. Very doable, challenging, but they are very, very well designed and once finished, they work very well. They are a lot of fun to build for me and my 9-year old. This book is different to the two others mentioned here, because it goes directly into the projects without any introduction to Mindstorms building or NXT-G programming tutorials. So the content is fully dedicated to the projects. The download section of the blog forum is working OK, so now you can download the programs. And last but not least, when you get stuck at some point, you can always count on the forums for help. I posted a question and one the the co-authors replied to me within a few hours, with a solution. The book is the "tip of the iceberg" because there is a community around it that goes beyond the printed works.The only wish for this middle-age reviewer (with a middle-age eyesight) is building instructions in glorious Lego colors. As in the other books they are in greyscale. To the credit of the authors, they did poll their readership in the blog about this when the book was still in the works, and the result was overwhelmingly in favor of B&W to keep the cost down.This book makes my Mindstorms NXT experience so much enjoyable that I rate it with five stars.

I liked the book, but it assumes that you are using the NXT 1.0 set and it turns out the sets have different parts. So when I purchased the book I found out that I could only make a few of the items. I have since purchased the additional parts I needed and can build them all now, but it was a little bit of a let down when I received the book and could not build them all.

This book is for Mindstorms 1.0, not 2.0 which is why people think that you need more than one Mindstorms set for the projects. But you only need one set.

This does look like an interesting book with several great projects. I was intrigued enough to order it along with the NXT 2.0 set, based on the Amazon recommendation. This book uses parts that are not in the NXT 2.0 (especially gears). You can not build some of these projects with just the parts in the NXT 2.0 set. As a novice to these kits I didn't know enough about them to even consider the differences. Now I need to find the pieces that I need to actually build these projects, because they are too compelling to ignore. I like the book, just beware of the differences between the older NXT set and the newer NXT 2.0 set.

An intriguing mix of autonomous and non-autonomous projects. written for middle school comprehension, yet challenging enough for adults. I would recommend this book to anyone who dabbles in robotics.

I bought this for my children and they do really like it. Definitely creative fun and entertaining to keep young minds active.

I bought this book for my seven year old son. He finds it difficult to understand the images. I have to constantly help him to build the models. I think if the images were colored he might have had a better chance of understanding. I very well understand that would have increased the price of the book exponentially. I book has good ideas but might be difficult for kids to do.

Having just gotten the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit, I was very excited to see this new book on the market. One-Kit Wonders offers ten new projects that can be built with just the NXT kit - no extra parts necessary.This book provides detailed layouts and step-by-step instructions for building each project (including illustrations). It also gives thorough information on programming each robot. This is very important for users like me who do not have any programming background.One great aspect about One-Kit Wonders is that it features something for eveyone in the family. The projects included range from an M&M Sorter (my kids favorite) to a dragster (my husbands favorite) to a bike that steers and moves by itself (my personal favorite).Adding color to the illustrations is the one thing that I found I would change about One-Kit Wonders. At times it is hard to tell which pieces needed to be used because the pictures are various shades of gray. This would make it much easier to use, especially for kids who might be trying to do these projects on their own.Another useful feature about this particular book is that it is bound using RepKover so that it will lay flat. This comes in handy when you're snapping lego together and need both hands. I won't say that this worked perfectly, but it was definitely better about staying open than the standard book.Overall, however, I was very pleased with LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT One-Kit Wonders. It provides hours and hours of entertainment and was fairly easy to use despite the lack of color. I had a blast with my kids building some of these great projects, and we'll definitely be on the lookout for the next book of this type.