Bigshot: Home - Mission

Today’s Cameras

The camera gives us a powerful means to express ourselves and communicate with each other. Today, the camera is almost exclusively designed for, and marketed to, adults. A typical consumer digital camera comes with a sleek silver or black exterior and is densely packed with components and features. If one tries to open up one of these devices to study its innards, it is unlikely to function when put back together. We believe that camera manufacturers have largely overlooked an important demographic in kids and a compelling application in education.

Bigshot: A Camera for Education

A camera designed for kids can be much more than just a toy: it can serve as a powerful educational medium. (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.

Learn by Building

Bigshot comes as a kit that can be assembled in several stages, each stage giving the student hands-on exposure to important science and engineering concepts. The educational materials on this website that describe Bigshot are designed to keep the students engaged through the entire process of building the camera. This is achieved through playful and yet detailed illustrations and interactive demonstrations. By the time the student has assembled Bigshot, he or she would have been exposed to fundamental concepts in optics, mechanics, electromagnetism, electronics, image processing, and even the physiology of the human eye.

Create by Using

In 2004, Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski made the documentary Born into Brothels, which was a portrait of several children living in the most inhumane conditions in the red light district of Calcutta. Zana Briski gave each child a camera and taught them photography. With their cameras, the children began to look at their world with new eyes. Born into Brothels was one of the sources of inspiration for the Bigshot project. Once Bigshot has been assembled, it can be used to tap into the student’s creative potential as a photographer. The student can compose and capture moments from their everyday lives, while experimenting with framing, lighting, and motion.

Express by Sharing

Bigshot comes with software tools that enable students in a school with even a single computer to download, view, and print their photos. With their teachers' help, students can share their favorite photos and related stories with other students in different communities or even different countries. Eventually, we hope to create an online community of students from various schools around the world. We believe that the sharing of life experiences through photos, across geographical and cultural boundaries, is a powerful way to open the minds of children who may not have the resources to travel the world.

Our Target Audience

The main goal of the Bigshot project is to exploit the engaging nature of cameras to draw school children to math and science. In doing so, we are particularly interested in targeting underprivileged and underrepresented children. However, Bigshot has been designed to reach a very wide audience. High school students could learn and assemble Bigshot without supervision. For elementary and middle school students, a teacher may pick bits and pieces from our Learn section and add their own (age appropriate) primers to develop a course or an after-school program. An adult who is fascinated by cameras but is not aware of its inner workings may find answers to some of their questions.