Science Week Ireland: The next gadget that I want to buy

Damien Mulley has been organising an awesome competition to promote Science Week Ireland. If you haven't noticed, I'm rather fond of Lego. Even though I'm a grown man (with deep voice, moustache and everything), I still love creating characters, cities, and mostly short movie recreations with these little connecting pieces of plastic.

My latest obsession in Lego is having motorised mechanisms that can make a truck drive in a straight line or maybe if I'm extra creative, create a building with real working sliding doors at the push of a button. I've decided I want to save up one for one hell of a gadget: Lego Mindstorms.
At €240, it doesn't come cheap. Even with Christmas on the way, I doubt Santa would get me this toy. I'm saving up all the money I can, despite the fact that there's a plethora of games and DVDs on my shopping list right now which I'll never have the time to come around to anyways.

Here are some highly recommended examples of what can be achieved with this nifty bit of kit as found on Youtube:

-The automatic toilet paper dispenser. At the push of a button you'll save yourself straining your wrist when ripping off the 23 squares of apparently needed toilet paper

-The SPC. The self parking car using motion sensors. Amazing.

-The rubik cube solver. Amazing-er?

-This mind-boggling machine can produce cars. I am not making this up.

-The bubble gum sorter. A giant monstrosity of a machine that is large and practical.

-This contraption called the Wiigobot can win a perfect game of Wii Bowling. How fitting...

Just watching those clips really sends my mind into creative overdrive of sorts. According to it's wikipedia page, it's got 30 different programming languages. This is the future of teaching mechanical engineering to children and is something that will keep me busy once I save enough money to buy it.