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Get creative with parts. Use cardboard or sheet plastic for the circuit board material (careful not to melt the plastic with soldering irons). Use a cereal box, or some other small box, or PVC for the project box. Get the kids to bring creative parts from home.
 
  Build a metal detector.
 
  The Electronic Goldmine and others offer assorted parts in an unsorted box for cheap. You could buy bulk parts like this and have the kids sort them (make them learn how to measure components in the process). As a warning, sometimes you get a lot of what you don't need and very little of what you do. Resistors and capacitors can be combined to get what you need most of the time, but not always the case with the ICs. Get those from Mouser or Digikey. Read Make Blog for ideas, they're good. Recently they linked to a guy using a sponge and ferric chloride to etch circuit boards cheap, easy and fast.

But a much, much better option is to buy this starter kit and learn the hot new Arduino instead of the aging Basic Stamp. You'll need to start a junk drawer of components, including resistor assortment like these four kits. Local Amateur Radio HamFests and eBay are both good places to fill out your junk box.

Some good resources:

o The Arduino Home Page
o Peter Anderson's Arduino page (the whole site is great, and most can be adapted to the Arduino)
o Sparkfun Tutorials (and don't miss out on their store that has all the good stuff)
o The Electronic Goldmine is a great resource for odd surplus electronics.

Surplus is great...lots of good parts available, can really reduce the cost of a project, or even inspire a new one. My favorite surplus electronics store these past 6 years is the Electronic Goldmine. They recently fixed up their website, and always have lots of standard parts as well as great deals on unique stuff.

For electronic parts, you just can't possibly leave out the Electronic Goldmine. They've been around a long time, and in my experience offer the best surplus stuff you can find while charging the least they can get away with. Their bagged assortments are good, and their Electronic Surprise box is actually a good deal if you don't mind sorting through a box of jumbled parts. They also carry many standard components to round out whatever project you're doing.

If you ever want to build a CNC machine, check out TurboCNC. It's "shareware" in the sense that you are free to download and use the fully-functional, nagless program...and what a program it is. TurboCNC 3 has been used by thousands of hobby CNC'ers, and just recently TurboCNC 4 was released with lots of rewritten code, vastly improved user interface, and better stepping rates. This program will pulse stepper motors up to 30KHz on a junker 486 computer with parallel port, depending on the timer hardware. Version 4 adds Pentium timer support, resulting in pulse rates beyond 100,000Hz. The price rose from $20 to $60 with the release of the new version, but that price is if you feel like supporting Dave and his team, and will get you the full sourcecode to the program.

For cheap PCBs: nobody can beat Olimex. Yeah, they're based out of Bulgaria, and the first setup of payment can be a little tricky. But you'll get a double-sided board with plated holes, solder mask, and silkscreen...about $25 for 6" x 4" board. What's even better is that you can send them a number of files, then give them a sketch of how you want the boards arranged and repeated in the 6"x4" area...and they will panelize and cut them out for you, free. That's impressive if you've ever checked out the costs of doing something similar with other PCB houses. Many of them give the impression that it's like cheating to try to get more than one board out of the standard board size, even if your design only requires a few square inches. With Olimex I've gotten up to ten boards for that cheap price. It kind of makes you wonder what other ways you can use outsourcing, instead of whining about it and trying to make the government give your old job back.

By the way, this list has a long way to go before it's the most exhaustive I've seen. For the ultimate in DIY electronics articles and links, try ePanorama, it's been around a long time.

Your idea of using surplus is only good is you have whatever said surplus already laying around. I don't happen to have any of the old parts you mention (gameboys, zip drives, scanner, etc.) lying around, or you have a large enough surplus supply (electronic goldmine, ocean state electronics, ebay but prices get whacked quickly) on the market.

Experimenting with cheap 8-bit microcontrollers such as Microchip's PIC or Atmel's AVRs is quite cheap, and typically all you need is a chip and one (really cheap if want) device - a programmer to transfer the (binary/hex) programs from your PC to the microcontroller's flash memory.

You will quickly outgrow Radio Shack unless you need a part right now and you don't have the right one in your own stock pile, often referred to as a "junk box" regardless of actual physical size. You should be getting the free catalogs (or CDs) from Digikey, Mouser, Newark, and Jameco. These all have usable online ordering systems and reasonable minimum order & shipping fees. UK geeks check G3SEK's UK Component and Tool Suppliers web page.

Many useful projects can be made for less than $100 even if you need to buy all the parts. After you build a collection of common parts (common resistors, capacitor values, PIC 16F628, AVR AT90S2313, red & green LEDs, 2N2222A, 2N3904, 2N3906, 2N4401, 2N4403, 2N4416, 4N25, 1N4148, 1N4001, 1N4007, etc.) and tools this cost will go down.

The real question is do they assume a general audience or do they assume a "knowledgeable user" is their target market? If the stuff is purely "cookbook" & kit building (AmQRP kits as an example) with little or no encouragement (and knowledge transfer) for the average Make reader to explore and expand it won't survive IMHO. BTW AmQRP kits on their own are pretty limited at expanding your knowledge, but combined with the AMQRP Homebrewer magazine and Conference Proceedings they do teach a lot. There is also the QRP-L mailing list which is very useful for technical questions (and has a rich archive)

I think it should be what Nuts and Volts magazine tries to be, but without the "legacy" dead weight and filler articles. A gentler introduction to most of the Circuit Cellar type stuff.

If people think this will recreate the Homebrew Computer Club, I expect they will be mistaken, but if you expect it to awaken the curiousity and encourage youth to learn about electronics, then I hope it is a brillent success.

In the end, I am curious and not quite sure what to expect of Make. It could be really lame if all it ends up being is computer geeks pretending to be electronic engineers (or electronic hobbyists). I hope that at least 10% of it expands what I know, which is more than I can say of books like Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks (O'Reilly) and Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty. I am more interested in reading stuff like Hacking the Xbox (An Introduction to Reverse Engineering) by Andrew "bunnie" Huang which starts simple but gets into FPGAs and reverse engineering.

Apache Reclamation and Electronics (Apache & 3rd Ave) - they are a litteral mechanical and electronics junkyard - big or small, they have it all (I have noted a couple of C02 lasers there, as well as some larger heavy equipment, labware, motors, pumps, hydraulics, wire, pneumatics, etc)

Equipment Exchange (515 E Grant Street - behind BOB off of 7th Street) - lots and lots of major electronic and industrial FAB equipment here - ovens, wave solder lines, industrial robots, electron microscopes, regular microscopes, and other such things. Lots of small funky stuff too (be sure to check out the basement area for real fun items).

EliTek (EMC) 3855 N. 29th Ave - mostly PC and used/surplus business equipment. Be wary, they can rip you if you don't know what you are looking at/for. I have gotten some real sweet deals though (recently, an HP LaserJet 6P, 25000 page count - cost me $100.00 - bought a toner cartridge, and got me one hell of a sweet laser printer to replace a crappy ink jet that was always clogging or running out of ink - for under $200!). Sometimes they have funky stuff come in (recently, they had a bunch of Sony 15" LCDs come in - most were broke, but I bought a couple to swap parts for $20.00 - have yet to play with them to see if I can get one working, but for $20.00 it is worth the shot!).

Ok, out in Scottsdale there is the Electronics Goldmine, mainly an online store. Also, I like All Electronics in LA for parts, too.

I know of several other places, mainly online parts stores, but most of those I haven't purchased from, so I can't reccommend them...

Oh yeah, one more - but they mostly are through a website and catalog ads (in Nuts and Volts, mostly), but they are based in Scottsdale:

Electronic Goldmine

Electronics Goldmine, despite the name, always seems to have a variety of stuff in their catalogs. They don't have the "one of a kind" stuff, but they have lots of odd little things that there aren't enought for most stores to carry...