Japan's schools adopt Lego Mindstorms

Given Japan's general robocentricity the question should perhaps be "why did it take them so long?", but Lego Japan has apparently teamed up with a company called Eiwa System Management to offer a system called Warp5500 that uses Lego Mindstorms technology to provide a Ministry of Education-approved curriculum for junior high school students that teaches them how to build robots. Given that our exposure to computers, let alone robots, in school amounted to programming BASIC on a BBC B,
we're wondering if we weren't born too early. The learning curve for teachers can't be getting any easier, though.

[Via Ascii24 (Japanese)]