Big Shot: Build Your Own Digital Camera

Sure, you own a digital camera, but do you know what's inside? Faeries, maybe, working in a darkroom to develop your photos instantly? The Big Shot's a camera kit for kids to put together, teaching them how digital cameras work.


In a Skittles array of colors, the Big Shot's actually designed to be put together and taken apart again, unlike real cameras, and it's aimed squarely at kids, developed by Columbia University's Computer Vision Lab. It's actually a fairly sophisticated kit in some ways—the really unique component of the Big Shot, the lens wheel, contains three different lenses and viewfinder stencils—and it has a crank for manual, battery-less power.

It's not for sale yet, because it's still in final testing, but I'm really excited to what this thing can do—for digital lomography, it could be more popular with hipsters than kids.