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Lots of people have been working in this field. The most impressive results are achieved by the astronomy community. link It is possible to produce a home made spectrometer that gets useful results. Some of these are capable of resolution sufficient to identify chemicals. These are sophisticated and often use a peltier cell to cool the CCD in order to reduce noise. link

I did a project whose aim was to produce a cheap spectrometer to match paint colors. link The problems I found were:

1. Cheap webcams are quite noisy
2. Cheap webcams are not at all linear
3. For dark colors, sensitivity is a big problem
4. The spectrum of the light source varies depending on which angle you view it from.
5. Organizing the data is perhaps the biggest problem of all

My own engineering trade-off was sensitivity vs. resolution. To get spectra for dark colored paints, I widened the slit which reduced resolution. That, as far as I could tell, was reasonable because I wasn't trying to identify chemicals and the spectra from paints weren't particularly sharp.

The folks in TFA have a site where people can upload spectra. That's fine but a huge database of spectra is not too useful. The spectra have to be organized somehow. Here's an example. In fact the problem can be quite daunting

Don't forget these:

http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html - If you have smart 8th graders, they can do simulated astronomy and learn how we know some of the things we know

Stellarium and Skycharts (Cartes du Ceil) are among the best sky simulation and mapping software and well worth a look along with Stellarium. Or try Kstars on Linux
http://www.stellarium.org/
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download (newer more comprehensive
http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/oldversion/index.html - Version 2 (older, easier on the PC)

NASA World Wind
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/

Hubble for pretty pictures and the stories behind them
http://hubblesite.org/

If they don't mind math try a gravity simulator
http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/what.html

Various Roller Coaster Simulators

Rasmol Molecule simulator
http://rasmol.org/
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

Scorched Earth style artillery games may get their imagination fired (but be careful as political correctness may mean you're fired)

Much more. No time to post right now though.
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

make one yourself. some people do ;)

Freeware:

http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/

Stars' brightness are rated starting at -1 for the brightest. The larger the number the dimmer the star.

More info.

You would have to have some serious equipment to be able to see something that Sky Charts doesn't have available.

Also, for completness (for Palm OS-based PDA users), Planetarium (http://www.aho.ch/pilotplanets/) is also a Must Have.

The main KDE app I probably use is kstars, because there isn't much available in the way of open source astronomy software.

Have you looked at XEphem? It's certainly open source; I haven't looked at kstars in a while so I don't know how the current features list/ease of use/etc. compares between the two. See http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/

My favorite for a long time has been Sky Charts, though: http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/index.html. This is the stable, free-but-not-Open-Source version for Windows only. There's a development version that's GPLd that also runs on Linux; see http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/index.php

Sky Charts (Cartes du Ceil) is pretty good and it is also being ported to linux from Delphi.

A number of people that I've talked with really like the free (beer) software Cartes du Ciel. You can find it at this website

There a great OpenGl lunar atlas that I'm using now as well (beats the heck out of the paper versions) here

There are links from either site to more software for variable star observering and sky chart contruction.