While, none of these are new to the scene, there are technologies which everyone I've talked to loves - so I figured I'd post em' all in the same place :) Microsoft Robotics Studio (Level = know what a robot is): Write some code to run a robot - except you don't really need to write code. Robotics Studio uses a "visual programming" language which is essentially a set of blocks you can attach to make a program (think duplos for non-coders). Then you can download your code onto a wide variety of robots