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Considering that you can pickup free portable chargers at trade shows, they must cost next to nothing to source. The LED adds a little bit more to the price but again not much. The whole package is very cheap wholesale and can probably be marked with whatever brand you want if you ask an Alibaba vendor. The $20 comes into play when it reaches the store. The store has already bought them from some company that bought them from China so there's already a slight markup there and then the store adds a little more. They know people will buy them and depending on what kind of store it is, can charge a little more if they know their customers well. A Walmart-like store isn't going to be able to sell them for too much above cost but a specialty bike shop can mark them up more since their customers are already spending higher prices. A specialty bike shop might even order them with custom branding, adding a little more to the final price.

As for something like the Ikea bulb in the article, it includes an RF module that isn't that cheap. It costs about $7 per 1000 pieces. Maybe they get it for $5 or $6. Add in the slightly more expensive housing, it look like a halogen bulb but is LED, and then add in the cost of a quality RBG LED and the rest of the components and markup to get $15. Ikea does win out compared to other store for things like this because Ikea is buying the units from themself. The Ikea Sonos speaker is the only thing I've ever seen there that wasn't a pure Ikea product. They really have mastered horizontal and vertical integration.

There are SPI, I2C, ethernet, and UART blocks that you can usually just drop right into your design for communicating with external chips.

You aren't going to be able to build a super-fast CPU on an FPGA but there are plenty of other tasks you could give it. You can build a processor for analyze multiple sensors, looking for specific events that you could then feed to the uC or setup a DSP pipeline to filter the sensor data to look for patterns. The nice thing about an FPGA is that there is no interruption when it's running. The uC might be trying to feed data over wifi to the controller station and polling sensors/analyzing sensor data is going to bog things down really quick. Another task for an FPGA would be to act as a switch for a network within the robot. It would sit between all of the sensors/actuators and an ethernet-enabled uC located elsewhere in the robot. The FPGA would read command packets from the uC and translate tasks like "read temperature sensor #5" or "turn 15 degrees" into specific impulses on the pins while also turning sensor and feedback data into packets to send back to the uC. You could even run video feeds from cameras back to the uC over gigabit if the FPGA supports it. This way you can run a cheap, small uC to control things from a higher level while the i/o-plentiful FPGA does all the heavy lifting at 100Mb/s speeds.

Standardized testing has also restricted teachers to standardized teaching. They must complete X number of units from the binder every Y number of days. This leaves little time for the teacher to come up with their own lesson plans. I think there needs to be a balance between a teacher's autonomy in the classroom and standardization. I've heard many teachers complain while I was in school that they felt like they don't have the time to focus on the things they want to do in class. In my elementry school, the class would go to a different teacher for either STEM or liberal arts. I think this is a good start since because teachers can solely focus on material that is related, they can tie in lesson plans and make sure that the standardized subjects are taught efficiently to leave time for the other topics they want to focus on.

I remember in middle school, I had a couple teachers who would say "ok, this is the standardized stuff I have to say" and then go into a very boring lecture of what we just had been learning except the way we first learned it was interesting and engaging. They were simply dotting their i's to make sure that they did their job in conveying the material the state wanted us to know.