Second post, ran out of attachments and lines in the text box. More renders below, along with a zip of the .blend file. It was made w/ Blender 2.62 32bit for Windows, but should work on the most up to date build on any system. The program is small, and you can get it at blender.org
Torso/Limbs: The torso has that weird little box on it. Not really for anything, just to have something there. I guess we could have something on the screen, for the time being I just left it off. I was going to put a faint/dark mirror effect on it, but it would have increased my render times a lot. The arms are nurbs paths beveled w/ nurbs circles. The starting points (atm, base of neck and shoulders) are constrained to the torso (or specifically, the ball of the joint) and the objects at the ends are set to follow the path.
Hands: Nothing very special, I need to bone them. At the moment they're constrained enough to work with, just not very easy.
Outlet: I put an outlet on his lower back because... I don't know. I think it'd be cool to have the robot plug in a power tool and use at one point

Overall body: I had ideas for two robots, this one and then a shorter/wider one. Wanted to go for the classic tall & skinny and short & wide duo. The vague idea in my mind is a series of interactions between the two to illustrate the various lessons.
Materials: All (or almost all) materials are set as minneart shading with the darkness set to 0 or near 0, giving it that glow effect around the edges and the cel shaded apperance. The renders have an outline post processing effect which is the black you see.
The last two renders were made after the first post, but just show the stretch/squish of the shocks in the jaw.
So, any thoughts/comments/ideas? It's not boned or animated yet, but from the way it feels now, it should be relatively easy considering the level of complexity. I don't have much in the way of direction, just this character. At the moment, I'm just figuring out how to get him working. I really want the team to come up with the 'story' for it when the time comes; it'd be cooler if we all decided what would be in it rather then just me or the animation team.