Which language to use ?

Having acquired a lego rcx brick and fired it up with the firmware (with some very welcome help from Bob Fay) I now need to know what software to use and to say that I am confused would be an understatement. First of all I don't have lego's own version and they seem to be almost totally unhelpful in providing any useful support. NQC seems a little complex as I am trying to interest my grandchildren to make use of lego technic. Gordons brick programmer site appears to be dead (or resting !) I read an excellent report of robolab but nowhere (including their own site) tells me how to buy it orhow much it costs. They have a robolab video which is almost totally pointless and appears to be an attempt at art rather than conveying useful information. Readers will detect from my tone that I am very frustrated and close to chucking the brick out of the window and going back to meccano ! I would be grateful for any (polite !) suggestions. Cheers

If you're going to be teaching kids, it might be handy to have one of LEGOs two offerings availble, RIS code (that came with the commercial Mindstorms sets; I'm not sure if you can order it from LEGO S@H, but you should certainly be able to grab the CD from eBay pretty cheap, if you can't find someone here or on LUGNET to just mail you one. I'd send you one, but I'm not sure where any of mine are at the moment) or Robolab (sold through LEGO Education, formerly LEGO Dacta or Pitsco-Dacta here in the States; take a look at):

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Robolab will run on a Mac or PC, RIS code is PC only, but both are fairly kid friendly (RIS code more so, but much weaker than Robolab).

How old are the kids? It's not too bad, at least not if you (the adult) play around with it a little. For the Mac, MacNQC:

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(I'm using an older 3.something version) is a great self-contained environment providing just about everything you need.

Then I hope this reaches you in time. It's still a very worthy little robot brain, that you (oh, and of course the kids) can have a lot of fun with. The folks on LUGNET (news.lugnet.com) can probably provide some support as well.