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What Interests High-School Students?
Jim Willis asks: "Our IT Division happens to be populated with some civic-minded people who are interested in making time available for local high-school students interested in science and technology. Question is, we're not sure the best way to do it. We're mulling around the idea of sponsoring a robotics competition or some sort of programming fair/competition. Unfortunately, we've been out of high-school long enough to not know what excites students about technology. Slashdot readers (esp. those of you in high-school): Where should we focus our attention and donate/volunteer our time?"
Since everybody else in this thread seems to be focusing on the silly (though, sadly, accurate) let me suggest that you perhaps get involved with a home-school group or a *worthwhile* private school. You're much more likely to get the sincerely interested kids. You could also have interested public school kids come out. Apparently, that's now allowed, though I don't have all the legal details.
My experience over the years trying to volunteer my IT and Network Security expertise to the local school system has been very disappointing. Most recently our Board of Ed decided every kid in the high school should have a laptop. Many of us felt strongly that the decision was made without the proper research and thought. They had visited one single school and decided to adopt that school's plan verbatim.
The results have been poor, the kids have had a field day loading porn and games onto the computers. The school has accused many of the kids of using the laptops to cheat. They have had to hire three full time employees to fix the laptop's OS (Yup you guessed it, Windoze). They never looked at any other operating system, and they blew off any suggestion of evaluating Open Office, though they could not tell us why they absolutely needed Microsoft Office. When I suggested desktops instead of laptops so that the image could be reloaded nightly as other schools do, I was rebuffed. They actually implied that I didn't want the kids to have computers. They assumed that every kid would have a printer that worked with the laptop (A Sony model that doesn't show up on the Sony site or Google.) Tests have had to be postponed because teacher's computer's have failed, imagine they don't have back up machines for the teachers. Once they realized that they would have to provide printers for at least some of the kids they scrambled to get a printer on the network, no luck so far. The laptops sound is software controlled so the first 15 minutes of each class is spent listening to 20 or so laptops booting up. I could go on but I think you get the point.
In short it has been one disaster after another. Tonight my wife and I will be attending yet another Board of Ed meeting. I will be announcing the formation of a committee to elect a competent Board of Ed. Maybe then you kind folks can come here and help us clean up the mess.
That's a really good idea.
Give some information on (innocuous) cracking tricks, and with a stern warning "don't take this knowledge back, the school knows we taught you this so you're the first suspects", set them loose on an isolated network of Windows computers with random patches and a firewalled HTTP-only connection (so they can look up techniques). At the end of the round, you get points for the number of computers (possibly including yours) that you have either hard-disk or shell access to.
That would actually be pretty cool. I'll try to convince our computer club to host one, if we can get an isolated network of trashable machines. (You'll need to wipe the disks after the round; otherwise, you'll be using a pre-cracked computer.)
You are absolutely right. Back when I was in high school (89-93), the geeks in the Computer Club made a fortune with a matchmaking program they wrote. For a small amount of money ($3-5 IIRC), students would fill out a survey regarding what characteristics they were looking for in a date (bookish vs non-intellectual, blonde hair vs brunette, conservative vs. liberal, etc.). They also filled out a section that described themselves. The club members then entered the forms into a database and wrote an application to find three matches for each person. A few days later, every participating student received a printout with three potential matches.
It was hugely popular and made hundreds of dollars for the club's coffers.