According to this study (http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/61/music.htm), "those in the classical music condition performed better on the problem-solving task than those in the Punk music or No Music conditions". I've always listened to music at work, and if my boss ever told me to ditch the music, I would probably start looking for a new job elsewhere. Such a policy seems unwarranted, and any possible gain in productivity would be lost due to lower employee morale.

How about creating a very simple database as a back-end for a mock social-networking site? You can use the kids' actual names in the User table, and maybe create another table called Subject, for their favorite subjects (Math, English, Science, etc.). They can then learn how to query for, say, all kids born in a particular year with Math as their favorite subject. They can research Normalization. What would the effect of de-normalizing the User and Subject tables into just the User table?