Electronics

An interesting prototype of a "intelligent" toy can be seen here.

"When children play with toy cars they tell stories; they provide their own narration, voice-overs, and special effects - rolling cars over and over in slow motion and making dramatically stretched crashing noises.

The HotCam is a manual control (not remote control), toy car with an onboard (driver’s view) video camera and microphone. The HotCam car enables children to record certain ”˜scenes’ in their own stories. The children can then ”˜play’ their captured scenes through a television. In this way HotCam stories can be shared with parents, siblings and friends, and children can re-experience their stories."

Seems like a fantastic opportunity to observe and monitor children during play in real-life situations - unhindered by adults standing over them, or by going to an unfamiliar room with a huge black one-way mirror (observation room I mean!). Note the footage shows not only the child at play but also the social interactions with his sister. Although it is just a prototype Mattel did take on the original designer as an intern so you never know it may be hitting the shelves soon (at a ridiculously high price I dare say)

via Make

This ICT/SENIT game is new to me so I have been catching up by reading truck loads of material over the last 5 weeks, the results of which I will hopefully be posting up here at some point in the near future.
Much of the websites that I have been looking at can be found in the del.icio.us feed under ICT or something similar - I'll keep adding to it as I go. In essence the field is big with lots of interesting areas - and I have to say still lots of scope for OT to play a bigger role than what is already out there..

Since it seems relevant I thought I would quickly mention a few bits I've seen mentioned elsewhere on the net over the past few weeks..
These two input devices seem interesting and possibly useful for areas where they haven't been particularly designed for..

Septambic Keyboard: apart from a nice little how-to guide in pictures of how to make a splint (!) the site is giving away the source code to the project - perhaps handy (geddit?) for anyone interested in hacking up their own wearable input device.

The Ergodex DX1 Input system, appears to be something particularly designed for the gamer market. In short, its a system that allows you to stick keys in any configuration on the board. I want one..

Oh and lastly, something that may be interesting to you if you liked this post; there is a posting on bbc news regarding a Infrared Sound Touch (IST) switch being used by Stephen Hawking.