BigShot
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Big Shot self-assembly digital camera kit finally shipping to curious kids
While we were growing up, you had to take things apart to find out how they broke worked. Big Shot camera sets about things the other way around, coming in kit form to help kids learn exactly what goes into making a camera tick. It's been in the prototype stage long enough for its initial audience to have almost grown up, but none the less it's finally available to buy. The $89 camera has a 3-megapixel sensor, a 1.4-inch LCD screen, plus three lenses for different shooting modes (normal, 3D and panorama). Big Shot's inventor, Prof Shree Naya, has a similar vision to other educational products like the Raspberry Pi and OLPC, where he hopes that if enough sell, he can send some off to children with less resources. That was probably on Naya's mind when he decided to add a hand crank for human-powered operation, making this the wind-up gadget for the Instagram generation.
Big Shot camera kit could help turn your kid on to the dark world of the teardown
Pardon us while we freely admit that we have literally no idea what's going on inside a camera -- whether it's digital or those quaint film-based ones you hear about from your grandma. Luckily, our own kids might not have to suffer as we have: a group at the Computer Vision Laboratory at Columbia University have designed and built a prototype digital camera that should demystify the devices. The Big Shot digital camera kit, if / when it hits the market, will be a box of all the necessary parts for kids to be able to build their own simple, candy-colored digital camera. While the Big Shot is still in prototype testing phase, we really hope this gadget (and more like it) makes it to the market sometime soon.
