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My kids and I decided to learn how to build and program robots this summer.
None of that virtual stuff for the 13 year old. She wants to build a living, breathing robot that moves through real, not cyberspace. And, since dealing with the physical world is an interesting thing for kids to learn to do, I did not object.
In this lesson, you create a two-wheeled cart that is supposed to ride on a
string like a tightrope walker. 
I thought we were well-prepared with Legos. Silly me! We are fully stocked with Duplos, which are Legos for babies. For you computer types, that means we are platform-incompatible with Legos.
Not a biggie, except that we lacked a rider for our cart like the one in the picture.
Well, we put the cart together with alacrity.
We found a hanger, bent it, got it through the proper holes.
We found some string and strung it across the kitchen without decapitating anyone. (The 13 year old figured out that heavy-duty magnets would hold one end of the string onto the refrigerator pretty well.)
We put the cart on the string, let go, and, CRASH! It immediately tipped over off the string and broke up into its constituent pieces. The book says nothing about balance. Real things need to be balanced in order to walk like tightrope walkers. The kids didn't mention anything about this, so I didn't either.
"Let's make it like a ski lift," suggested the older one. We turned the cart upside down and hung it from the string with the bottom of the wheels above the string. Let it go.
WHOOSH! It flew across the kitchen. Great fun. But we were disappointed at the lack of a rider. Luckily, Lego Crazy Action Contraptions comes with a number of rubber bands. We put a rubber band around the cart and hung a metal butterfly that just happened to be in the kitchen from the cart.
WHOOSH! It flew across the kitchen. Then, we tied the butterfly
to the back of a toy lion that was lying around. And tried again. 
WHOOSH! It flew across the kitchen. This was so much fun that the kids had to go get Daddy.
While they were gone, I decided to try once more with the cart right-side-up. I fiddled with the hanger a bit, moving the weight of the hanger to the side of the cart that seemed the lighter. Just as they got back, I let the daredevil go. It flew across the room.
"How did you do that?" the kids shouted. I explained about balance.
They decided to recapitulate the entire experiment for their Dad. Decided they liked
the skiing better, although the Daredevil did seem to move faster. I suggested that they
could hang more complicated things from the Daredevil, but they didn't want to.
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