Date: 07/10/2012
Person: 14 year old cousin.
His impression:
He was at first confused when he saw scribbler because he felt that I had built the robot. My cousin had already seen me before working with VEX robotics. When I told him that it came as it is out of the box, he felt that there was nothing special that I had done by buying a already built robot.
I tried explaining to him that it was the programming and what I told the robot to do that really mattered.
Demo
I showed him the infrared test in which the robot turns whenever there is an obstacle in front. He was not very amazed by it. He criticized the robot that it was small and could not do much apart from moving around. After that he left the room.
My Conclusion
My cousin loves to play around with LEGOS and has a big collection of them. When I used to work on the robots constructed using the VEX robotics kit, he was always very keen to play around and touch them, even though I forbade him to do so. He would bug me until I let him have the controller for the robot. He used the controller very naturally which I feel was because it was similar to a video games controller and the robot was a more like a advanced remote controlled car. Even when I first gave it to him, he was able to intuitively understand the basic controls and by little trial and error was able to understand most of them. The familiarity with LEGOS and other toys, I think, really gives vex robots an edge over the scribbler.
