Thanks everyone for your thoughts.
Yes he would go to lessons each week and be expected to practice - the hard thing would be limiting him to 20 or 30 mins a day! The expectation of others (not us) is that he would be participating in competitions at the national level. So we're really talking about having a quite serious intent. He'll be exposed to the senior high robotics lab so PB and 22B are probably right that he might want to move on to more technical robotics and making his own, sooner rather than later.
He's already saved and purchased a raspberry pi (initially just to do minecraft hacks) and loves both python and scratch. And maybe, just maybe, the minecraft obsession of the past 3 years is coming to an end.
When I was thinking of it as a present it had been with the intention that he would contribute around a 1/3 of the cost. Thinking of it as a tool has made me reconsider that, so it's been interesting to hear the approaches on instruments. Of course with instruments you can hire them - no luck dong that for this.
I think I'm still on the fence.
ETA Just to clarify its not a mandatory requirement to own one for his course and the software is free to download. It's just that he wouldn't get to check his programming by actually running it, until his lesson each week and he'd find that very frustrating. He's also very creative so exploring ideas outside of class would be a big thing for him too.
Last edited by freya; 10/27/14 07:03 PM.
