How to eat pizza. During class!!! Your students will love You!

When I was a teen I did a two-week course at Digipen and all of us came out with a finished game. Many of the kids there had NO experience with programming. A game from scratch is more than doable, you just have to adjust what "scratch" means and what a "finished" game looks like. We were given a working wrapper to handle any complex code. Bitting, drawing, windows code, input, etc was all handled via the wrapper.

Yeah no one had a game with 40 hours of gameplay, but we all had something we could play and show our friends, and it was awesome.

If you want to see what our team made, here is the link. You can see it's nothing complicated, but we had a blast with it: Duck Slaughter

aware that this is kind of old, but aren't the Digipen courses for highschoolers like 80+ hours?

This might be slightly off what you're thinking of, but I saw these Apple I kits where you get the chips and solder your own Apple I replica together (except it has a VGA socket and such).

What would be really cool if there was a longer course was one where people assemble such computers from scratch and then write a game for them.

To please the math is boring crowd; I guess i was one of them until i discovered programming; once you can take them math from pen and paper to awesome things on your screen it becomes much more exciting to most.

Lennard jones material simulation, or verlet soft-body simulation is only a handfull of rather explainable lines of code and concepts away, and there is a wealth of things to be learned there, not to mention some game related applications.

Sounds like a great course you are teaching; im personally very interested in the subject of how to get people to appreciate math, and i believe there are quite a few programs one can write in a few lines of code that will do ever so much more the stimulate the imagination than the same old circles and fractions which we are used to being fed for most of our childhood.