What do these phrases mean to you? “Circuit board”, “gearbox”, “dynamo and battery”? If your answer is “digital camera” then you are either cheating or you already know about the BigShot, a kit camera designed to let kids learn about digicams by building one.

The BigShot, still in testing, is a super-simple digicam from the Computer Vision Lab at Columbia University. It comes in parts, ready to be assembled (by kids, but I can’t wait to get my hands on one), and teaches you along the way how these things work. It’s not quite the transparent view you get from making an old analog camera, where you can see how everything works, but it’s as close as you can get from a machine that uses circuit boards.

The feature set itself is interesting enough. The BigShot is powered by a single AA battery, or by spinning a crank (4-6 rotations will provide enough power for one shot). The flash is made up of LEDs, and there is no removable memory card — instead you just hook up the camera to a computer via USB.

The lens arrangement is the best part, though. An array of options is laid out on a dial, which is rotated into position, much like the elements on a microscope. Matched pairs sit opposite each other on the circle, so you look through one (there is nor screen on the back) and take a picture through it’s partner. Lens choices are “normal” (a 43º field of view), “panoramic”, which appears to act likE an anamorphic lens, squishing the scene horizontally to be stretched back out in the accompanying BigShot software, and “Stereo Prism”, which splits an image into stereo pairs, again for processing later.

One oddity, caused by the lack of a screen, is that you can only delete the last photo you took: this is done by turning the control dial to the trashcan icon and pressing the shutter. We actually like this setup: along with the limited (and unspecified) amount of on-board memory and the lack of an image review function is that you will shoot like you did with film — every frame is precious and everything comes as a surprise when you finally get to see the photos.

As a non mass market educational aid, it’s sure to be too expensive. But perhaps, if sold as a toy, or advertised as a low-tech camera, kind of a digital Lomo, it could take off. I’m all over this, and if it comes in at under $100 I’ll be grabbing one for myself and my nephew, who doesn’t have enough geek influences in his life.

Project page [BigShot via Make]