Mindboards

I've just spent 2 days and many, many hours trying to learn the basics for programming the EV3 robot with the Lego-provided software. Simple motor operations are fairly intuitive, but the flow functions are not. For example, I can't get the Track3r to operate with a simple loop until the infrared sensor detects an obstacle and reacts to it by backing up. Searching for tutorials provides some interesting videos, but I haven't found any step-by-step explanations of all the functions and their variables, so that I can make it operate the way I want.

And, quite frankly, I'm shocked that Lego doesn't provide any kind of proper user guides for such an expensive kit. After all, it indicates that the Mindstorm EV3 Home edition is appropriate for 10-year olds. I bought this for my 10-year old and am trying to learn enough to guide him so that he doesn't get frustrated. I'm 47 and can't figure it out! This appears to be a case of highly adept engineers designing a product and software that they assume everybody will understand, but what they really need to do is hire a layman writer who can empathize with the novice user and explain things appropriately.

Does anybody here know know of any Mindstorms for Dummies type of guides that provide a thorough and step-by-step explanation of the programming features for the software?

I highly recommend the book "The LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Laboratory" by Daniele Benedettelli. I'm about half way
through the book and have no complaints. The author covers on board programming very well and then
progresses to programming on your laptop or PC in a way I found easy to understand. In chapter 5 of the book,
there is an example of using a Switch Block with the Infrared sensor, and I think this code may be easily
adaptable to what you are trying to do. The author is a teacher and explains well the reasons for coding
and building a robot one way or another.

Thanks! I looked at that on Google books and it seems excellent. Looking forward to getting an education.

While you are waiting you could try -

http://www.stemcentric.com/ev3-tutorial/

http://www.firstlegoleague.org/sites/de ... amming.pdf

http://www.fastcompany.com/3016195/reve ... ego-wall-e

http://www.rjmcnamara.com/lego-mindstor ... c-bricxcc/

http://robotics.benedettelli.com/category/creations/