I can only hope that this eventually makes it into the regular market:

A camera designed for kids can be much more than just a toy: it can serve as a powerful educational medium.  We believe that such an educational camera must have a radically different design from that of a typical consumer camera.   (a) It should be designed as a kit for assembly by students.  The assembly process should not only demystify the workings of the camera, but also expose students to various science and engineering concepts.  (b) It should include features that cannot be found in other cameras, allowing students to explore new creative dimensions.   (c) It should be low-cost, with the potential to serve as the basis for a scalable social venture.  Bigshot has been designed with these goals in mind.

The killer is the rotating lens board on the front. The lens wheel (or polyoptic wheel as it’s called)has three settings: normal, panoramic, and stereo. Normal is what you would think  it is, normal photo. The panoramic lens gives you a 72 degree field of view and creates a nice barrel distortion, and the stereo is a small prism that acts as a beam splitter to shoot a left and right image onto the sensor.Software that comes with the camera will adjust the distortion from the pano lens and create red/blue anaglyph stereo images when you use the beam splitter. Oh, did I mention that the camera can be powered by either a single AA battery or a few cranks on the built in dynamo?

[via MAKE]

Bigshot: A Camera for Education.

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