Robotics/education kit for 13 year old recommendation?

[tcbetka]

Hmmm, paying a premium to learn a robotics platform that is so closed that you can't make anything worth building on...   With a cheap arduino you can make a robot easily, and in equal caliber to a nxt robot.  Plus you learn real building techniques (hot glue  ).  You can actually be creative.  One of the first things I made was a coilgun tank.  It's the coolest thing ever.

That's pretty much why I went with the Arduino actually. I plan to use the Arduino devices/libraries for other projects in my work, so it made complete sense to get as much experience with it as possible. There is so much that had been done with the libraries that you can use for seemingly anything you need to do, so the more experience I could get with Arduino stuff...the better. At least that's the way I looked at it.

TB

[ptricks]

You might want to look at Grove on seeed studio site. Seems like a low cost way to get into electronics and robotics.
Basically like arduino shields only smaller modules and not platform specific.
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/grove-t-3.html?ref=top