Toy company Lego has announced its plan to discontinue its buildable educational robot kits, Mindstorms, at the end of the year, Lego fan sites like Brick Fanatics and Brickset reported.

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Lego Mindstorms kits first debuted in September 1998. The kit allows users to build robots out of Lego bricks, gears, and mechanical components such as pins, beams, and motors. The robots could be programmed using the control hubs. Mindstorms kits were among the first toys to actively promote STEM learning which later became popular in the toy industry. Over the years, Mindstorms sets and components have been used to build astonishingly capable creations, Gizmodo reported. The core Mindstorms product line received its last update in 2013, which was the EV3 set.

Even though Lego will discontinue the Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit, it is not entirely moving away from the concept of educational robotics kits.

The company has guaranteed support to the different mobile apps on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Fire OS for another two years to help users to create and control Mindstorms robots.

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However, this does not imply that the robot control units will necessarily become useless bricks after 2024. According to the Verge, users could take the help of open-source tools for writing and uploading code to them, although a lack of official tools could make things more difficult for inexperienced builders.

At the same time, the company will have the Mindstorms team working on other projects, a statement posted by Brickset showed. However, the company did not specify which project they will work on.

Last year, Lego retired its Mindstorms EV3 system and directed customers to the Lego Education Spike kit rather than the Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit.

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(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)