Lego. Then he can compete in his schools FLL competitions and be far ahead of the other kids on his team. I am a coach for this year’s FLL team as well. No experience with the vex though.

As a kid I had Lego Mindstorms and I liked how it was able to interface with other Lego parts. I did find it kinda hard to program, but the Mindstorms coding was based on LabView, and it looks like both of these have coding options based on Scratch, which is how I first learned to code and would 100% recommend.

Idk much about the new Spike thing but if you have or would consider buying more legos I’d go for that one just for the extensibility.

I’ve used the Vex and Lego before, I prefer Lego personally as you can just use a Scratch plugin for it, whereas Vex requires its own programming language which is similar to Scratch but subtly different.

I got a Spike Prime for my guy when he was around seven or eight. He liked the idea and played with it a bit, but the novelty wore off and he stopped. He’s grabbed it a few times since then to mess about, but it doesn’t hold his attention.

I think the Spike stuff works best when solving a challenge or working with a team.

We bought an mbot last year https://www.makeblock.com/products/buy-mbot

Excitement was there, but it has had limited play. It’s a neat product, but fussy to program, so it’s not fun.