Today LEGO announced that they are retiring the Mindstorms brand and sets, and will focus on robotics products like 45678 SPIKE Prime, which we offer Video Curriculum to help teach it in the classroom. The current LEGO Mindstorms product, 51515 Robot Inventor will be discontinued at the end of 2022. LEGO is shifting away from LEGO Mindstorms rather than preparing to launch a new generation. 

Robot Academy has been working with LEGO MINDSTORMS since 2004 and designed LEGO Robots that can do everything the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, NXT, or Robot Inventor accomplished at 1/2 the price of LEGO MINDSTORMS.  Robot Academy mBot2 LEGO Robot  has 8 sensors (including Color, Gyro sensors) and will allow your students to build on the robot with technic LEGOs. Program in Scratch (block-based), microPython, and Python3 using PC, Mac, iPad, or Chromebook.  Your students can use the third motor on top to pull the other robots out of the BattleBot arena (a popular favorite) or drop objects or pick them up. Lots of possibilities for mechanical design. 

Here’s the full press release from LEGO:

Since its launch in September 1998, LEGO MINDSTORMS has been one of the core ‘Build & Code’ experiences in the company’s portfolio, carrying with it significant brand equity and becoming a stand-out experience for the early days of consumer robotics and leading to current Build & Code experiences such as SPIKE Prime, from LEGO Education’s LEGO Learning System.

However, now having a number of priorities in LEGO Education and other Build & Code experiences, we have decided to focus our resources and future plans by redirecting our MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor team and their expertise into different areas of the business.

This means the physical MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor product (51515) and its related elements (88016 and 88018) are to exit our portfolio from the end of 2022, whilst digital platforms – such as the LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor App – will remain live until at least the end of 2024.

We still have strong belief in the Build & Code proposition and will continue to support it through platforms such as SPIKE Prime, and we are continuing to hold on to the trademark for the MINDSTORMS brand and assessing our future plans together with LEGO Education.