Documentary storytelling takes an endless number of forms, one of the most fascinating being stories told by children about their day-to-day lives. Shree Nayar, a Columbia University computer scientist, saw huge potential for kids to express themselves while learning valuable skills.

Nayar’s project, called Bigshot, is a point-and-shoot digital camera that comes un-assembled in a kit. Kids follow the directions to put the pieces together, all the while learning the engineering and science concepts that make the camera work.

Like all digital cameras, the Bigshot needs a battery to work. But if the battery runs out before the user is done snapping photos, an integrated hand crank acts as a power generator. Three different lens modes – regular, wide angle, and 3D – give kids a wide variety of artistic possibilities.

The Bigshot is meant to educate children (and grownups) in underserved communities, giving them an opportunity to learn engineering, technology, science, and art. Children in these communities may not have other opportunities to have these educational and artistic experiences, and the Bigshot empowers them to learn and create. Nayar’s goal is to see his idea help children in underserved areas around the world.

The post Build-It-Yourself Camera Teaches Kids Engineering + Art first appeared on Gajitz.

The modern trend of hacking anything and everything never ceases to amaze us. The spectrum is wide; on one side, there is danger in the fact that the more sophisticated automobile computers get, the easier they are to hack. The other end is more fun, like this modification of a shift knob. Engineer Zachary Nelson used the Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller and the OpenXC Vehicle Interface to make a vibrating manual shift lever on a Ford Mustang.

It monitors the car’s speed, RPM and accelerator pedal position to alert the driver when to shift. It’s an incredibly smart way to teach someone how to drive a manual, particularly if they’re used to driving an automatic.  The brilliance lies in the design. Nelson used an Xbox 360 controller motor and a 3D printed shell – form and function rolled into one.

The post Vibrating Gear Shifter Tells Noobs When To Shift Gears first appeared on Gajitz.

Ever been afraid to raise your hand in class? If you’re like us, you typically let it slide when you have trouble following a professor’s lecture because you don’t want to seem dumb. Well, fear no more, as scientists at Spain’s la Universidad Carlos III are working on a pair of glasses that teachers can wear to tell whether or not their students are following them.

The glasses use augmented reality, a system that essentially places unreal things in your real-world environment. Through an app, students can select an icon that lets the professor know where the student is in terms of understanding the lecture. There are icons that tell the professor that the student is ‘getting it’, not ‘getting it’, to slow down, or that they know the answer to a question.

The icons cutely hover above the students’ heads. In smaller classes, this can be extremely valuable. For larger, stadium-like lectures, the app produces a diagram that combines all of the students’ understanding levels. If nothing else, this gives students carte blanche to play with their smart phones.

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We can think of more than a few elementary school teachers who were probably robots, but who stubbornly insisted on their humanity. Students in South Korea can stop wondering whether their English teachers are humans or robots (or aliens) because the egg-shaped, meter-high creatures are clearly electronic in origin. EngKey (short for “English jockey,” as in disc jockey) is a teaching robot that relays lessons from English teachers in the Philippines to students in 21 South Korean schools. According to South Korean education officials, shy students may feel more confident talking to a robot than to a human teacher, giving them a more positive learning experience overall.

Giving control of the classroom aides to Filipino teachers is less expensive than actually employing teachers to work at the schools, according to scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology where the robots were developed. The teachers controlling the bots can see and hear the students in the classrooms, while cameras trained on the teachers’ faces capture their own expressions which are then reflected on the Caucasian avatar atop the EngKey body. In addition to conversing with students in English, the robots can sing, dance and read books with the class. But they aren’t meant to replace human teachers altogether – they are intended to provide support to the regular teaching staff while engaging students on a whole new level.

The post Apple For Teacher? Bots Teach English in So. Korea Schools first appeared on Gajitz.

If you’ve ever attempted to teach yourself piano (or any other instrument, for that matter) you know it can be frustrating to go it alone. There are lots of systems and gadgets and programs to help you learn on your own, but not many of them provide the kind of self-paced, interactive help that the Gigiway Piano and Violin Learning Pen offers. The high-tech pen needs only to be pointed at a piece of music or a notation, and it’ll play the music or explain the notation. The pen can even be used as a tuner or as a digital metronome.

Budding musicians have to use the special books and sheet music that works with the pen, though the company will work to encode other music books (in large enough quantities) not already in their library. But this isn’t just a device that reads music for you: it was created and perfected by a team of professional musicians and broadcasters who recorded every bit of the audio material that the pen plays.

Besides just playing the piece and providing the names of certain notations, the pen can also give helpful hints about how to play a certain part of the music. Users can select the playback speed of the song, so if they’re having trouble grasping just how a certain section should sound, they can slow it down and play at a pace that’s easier to keep up with. The pen has built-in speakers, or it can be connected to headphones or external speakers depending on the practice environment. While it may not replace hands-on teachers entirely, the Gigiway seems like a great way to supplement lessons on your own.

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