Hasta La Gadget!

The Rapiro Robot Kit lets you have a little assistant follow you around the home.

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It’s time to rethink the way our children learn. It’s all a bit overwhelming, attempting to restructure the age-old classroom model, particularly in a system as bogged down in bureaucratic red tape as education. This month, however, we packed up our things and toured the country to find out how educational institutions are adopting new models to help reinvent the learning process — rather than sitting idly by, waiting for the system to change around them. Naturally, technology is playing a huge role in that shift, moving from models of teaching to models of learning, where students can explore, express themselves and learn at their own speed.

We kick things off in Chicago, where Jackie Moore, a former systems programmer, is teaching inner city students how to build robots in a shopping mall basement at LevelUP. Next up, we head Miami and California, to see how technologies like the iPad, Google Chromebook and One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop are being implemented in three schools, including interviews with educators, students, OLPC CEO Rodrigo Halaby and Google director of product management, Rajen Sheth. We’ll also talk to component retailers SparkFun and Adafruit about the initiatives those companies have implemented to help kids learn electronics at an early age, and then we sit down with American Museum of Natural History president, Ellen Futter, to discuss the ways the New York City institution is redefining itself for the 21st century.

We’ve also got an interview with Ali Partovi, a serial entrepreneur, who is working to make computer science an essential part of the elementary-level STEM program, through Code.org. Richard Culatta, the acting director of the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology discusses how devices can help target the learning process for individual students and LeapFrog CEO John Barbour tells us how his company is rethinking the educational toy. All that plus prognostications from John Roderick and some really sweet moose dioramas can be yours to enjoy after the break.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Laptops, Robots, Tablets, Science, Internet, Software, HD, Mobile, Alt, Google, Acer

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Now here is a robot that might come in handy for espionage missions – one that can bury itself.

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Lots of things can inspire mankind to greatness, but nothing quite like the support of a gigantic towering robot designed to fight equally gigantic mythical monsters. We’re only a few weeks out from Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim hitting theaters, but damned if we can’t wait for what is the closest thing we have to a Voltron movie yet.

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If you followed our Insert Coin: New Challengers contest at our first-ever Expand event, you may recognize this guy. The Ziphius, an WiFi-enabled aquatic drone powered by a Raspberry Pi, won $25,000 in prize money back in San Francisco, and three months later it’s taking the next big plunge: launching on Kickstarter. The bot launched its crowd-funding campaign tonight — at Engadget+ gdgt live in NYC, no less — and the Ziphius team says the $125,000 in requested money will go toward refining the device’s mold for the final-production version. As you can see from our gallery below, the package already looks sleeker, and it comes in pink along with several other new colors. Backers of all pocket sizes will be rewarded with everything from their name on the website ($1 pledge) to a Ziphius of their own ($195 and up). Click the source to check out the Kickstarter page for yourself and donate if you’re so inclined; the project has 29 days to meet that lofty funding goal.

Zach Honig contributed to this report.

Filed under: Robots

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Source: Kickstarter