If you want to inspire a young student with software development, tell them to find a way to fix software development.
The problem I am seeing today is that in spite of all the years we have been writing code, stuff is getting less reliable and stable and overall, I find the user experience of most technical things today appalling.
Obviously nothing that is being applied towards software development is working.
I find the Internet today to be worse then it ever has been. For instance I have a 50mbps connection and yet frequently I can't even load google.com because my browser tells me the connection is lost. How can today's broadband be even more unreliable then when I used to browse the internet using dialup?
I have a new Logitech remote that will freeze and not respond about 10 times an evening, in spite of about a dozen firmware updates applied already for it.
Most of the features of my "smart" TV are useless.
Games and Apps on my Android tablet or iPod Touch crash frequently and are updated regularly.
The most "advanced" OS on the planet, OS X, hangs on my every several days forcing a reboot.
There are rampant problems with a general lack of security of all digitally connected things. iOS 7 already has had 2 patches to fix security issues.
And I won't even touch all the issues that came out of Redmond over the years.
So there is a real big problem in software development, and it comes from people assuming they know how to write good software, but then, lets face it, good software is NOT being delivered today.
There needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift in how we develop software. The idea of releasing beta's, patching frequently, or Google's approach to update on a daily basis is no longer acceptable. There is no reason why "flawless" cannot be an objective to describe the user experience of using device or application. There is no reason why we cannot write flawless code. We have more processing power on our phones then we used to have on a supercomputer from 30 years ago, why can't we harness that power to develop a software process that produces zero bugs?
So, if you truly want to inspire a new generation of coders, forget about trying to entice then with current concepts in software development. Show them all the current problems with software development and then get them young minds thinking about solutions for a new era where software bugs and defects simply don't occur.