Lego Mindstorms EV3

                                                                   

Remember sitting in front of a Lego pieces piled willy-nilly on the floor? Now imagine putting them together to create functional robots you can program to do your bidding, after you finish building them.

Lego Mindstorms EV3 gives you the ability to piece together truly awesome robots like the fierce cobra bot R3PTAR and the scorpion like SPIK3R. You can control your creations with a remote or from your smart device via Bluetooth, and do things like have the cobra bot strike out by moving your device the same way. There's also an app with animations to help you with the build process for the five EV3 robots in the set.

Programming the finished creation is as simple as dragging and dropping instruction modules into a visual workspace and hitting play at the end. The bots also come with pre-written programs that showcase their more advanced capabilities, such as shooting red balls at infrared targets or navigating around obstacles.

With 594 bricks and a variety of sensors, motors and components, the EV3 offers a robotic programming playground that's extremely addictive. Price: $349.99.