Tag: Educational

Dexter Industries makes educational electronics and robotics kits for all levels of experience. With its new GoBox subscription service, the company aims to be more involved in the progress of robotics newbies, particularly children. The heart of GoBox is the GoPiGo, an open source robotic car based on the diminutive Raspberry Pi computing platform. When you subscribe to GoBox, each month you’ll receive a new sensor for the GoPiGo and a “mission” – a lesson in the form of a story or a roleplaying scenario that involves using the new sensor.

The Elements iPad app is one of the best alternatives to the traditional periodic table. But a mobile augmented reality company called DAQRI is working on something more interactive and intuitive. The company calls it Elements 4D, a set of building blocks that make learning about the elements fun and easy.

None of us ever want to experience an airplane crash first-hand, but you’ll soon have the opportunity to learn what happens inside and outside a commercial airliner when it does crash, thanks to the Discovery Channel.

These things look awesome. What you have here are building blocks that let you create cool robots by connecting sensors, motors, and feedback devices. The robots can even interact with the world around them. You won’t be building any kind of self-aware sentient being with these playthings, but your creation will be impressive as you “build with nature in mind”.

The guys at Online Schools scoured the Internet to come up with a lengthy but entertaining infographic about robots. It contains a lot of quiz show-type trivia, like the fact that the earliest known robot was a steam powered one, invented in 400 BC, that most robots are cow milkers, or that people who own a Roomba often clean their floors before putting the little spoiled brat to work.

Made by Steven Zhou and Syed Olmer Gilani of the National University of Singapore’s Interactive Multimedia Lab, What You Write Is What You Get (WYWIWYG) is a visual way of learning about language. Just like 5th Cell’s critically-acclaimed DS game Scribblenauts, WYWIWYG can analyze written words and come up with a virtual representation of the corresponding object. Even the set-up is a bit DS-like.

Sure, you might have just gone off and bought yourself a brand new 27-Inch iMac this week, but if that system seems like overkill for your needs, you could can always go to the opposite extreme.

When I first saw this clock design, I was scratching my head wondering why you’d want a clock that doesn’t keep time at all. After all, who wants a clock that you have to manually change the time on every time the minute changes?

Don’t you just love Wikipedia? Whether you’re a high school student writing a paper on some obscure old or dead person, a tech blogger who knows nothing about tech, or a lowly prankster who wants people to think, even for just 50 seconds, that the name “Microsoft” is really a description of someone’s primary sexual characteristic, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia has something for everyone.

Want to learn to play the piano – or at least play a song on the piano – without having to deal with creepy or boring instructors? Then you might want to try Concert Hands. It’s a sophisticated combination of software and hardware designed to make you look like a dork while you’re learning to play the piano.

Theodore Gray is one of the founders of technical computing software company Wolfram Research. But we’re not going to talk about that aspect of his life. You see Gray needed a conference table for his office.

Sure, you could go spend hundreds of dollars on one of those fancy robot kits, or you could be a cheap bastard like me, and pick up one of these. At just 12 bucks, you can’t expect much.