Blending the familiar fun of plastic, colourful bricks with a surprisingly complicated robot-building kit and code-writing primer, Lego Boost is part educational tool and part amazingly geeky high-tech toy.

Core to the set is a Bluetooth-enabled hub — with a built-in tilt sensor and motors and actuators that can power spinning or lifting actions — that acts as the base of your robotic creations. You can also attach a module to provide a secondary motor, or one with an optical sensor so your robot can detect motion, measure distance and see colour. Of course, you'll be using Lego blocks, in the shape of everything from axels to cogs to standard bricks, to build everything else.

All the tech is made understandable by a free companion app for iPad and Android tablets, which you'll need in order to program your creation and give it some personality via sound effects. There's a huge amount of content in the app, and it does a great job of building your skills gradually with a range of set builds before it takes off the training wheels.

My obsessively orderly side approved when I saw that the hundreds of tiny parts came in a dozen or so numbered packages, but of course this is still LEGO at its heart, and I was foolish to think things would stay so neat.

The beginner machine is a simple car that can spin a propeller, sense obstacles and drive as you instruct it. Some cute little Lego robots and an included play mat give some ideas of what you can do here. I had the car drive in circles until it detected a robot in front of it, at which point it would stop and sound its horn. (Eventually, at least. At first I accidentally had it sound its horn and run the robot over.)

All the cars pieces come from bag 1, but beyond this point each project calls for parts from all over the place, which means I had to quickly come to terms with opening all the bags into a single bucket, and with repeatedly dismantling my new robotic friends to repurpose their parts. My guess is that most kids aged seven to twelve, at whom this kit is pitched, will be more delighted than perturbed by this.

Following the app's instructions you'll make six very different types of robot. Each time you build one for the first time the program will stop to teach you some programming tricks (you drag and drop commands to make a line of code) before you go on to add complexity to your machine, meaning you can spend hours building just one.

It's definitely worth your time though, with projects including a traditional upright robot that rolls around and chatters, a quadrupedal kitten that can chase a toy around, a tractor with a fork for lifting and a even a Lego machine that makes other miniature Lego machines.

My favourite model is the guitar, which not only has a strummable bar on its body but also features a moveable slider on the neck. The sensor aims up at the slider, so when you move it up and down along the fretboard you can make different notes. It's unreal to think this thing is made of the same Lego blocks as my earlier propeller car.

Of course most of the pieces here are just standard Lego, and you could conceivably add to any of the designs with your own blocks. If you'd rather start from scratch, you can jump into a wholly open "creative canvas" mode at any point, where the app gives you the tools to program for the hub and its modules however you've laid them out.

Here you'll find everything from if/then statements to specific controls for the various functions and motors, and you're free to write as complex or as simple code as you like. It sounds intense, but it actually follows logically from the stuff you get taught programming the set robots, which I guess is kind of the point.

With full access to the motors, sensors and actuators, and the ability to build whatever you want with the Lego itself, the only limit on the kind of robotic creations you could make is your imagination. And, I suppose, the rather short cables that connect the two modules to the central hub.

At a recommended price of $250, Boost is a challenging but rewarding kit, even for those of usa little older than the age range suggested on the box. It should provide hours of fun (and some understanding of code basics) to someone who just wants to go through and make one of the robots, but enthusiastic creators could give life to just about any Lego creation they can dream up.