Forget teaching programming entirely. If they are asking for game design and you teach programming, you have done them a disservice. Programming isn't game design. It's what you do after the game designer tells you what the design does.

Go look at Ian Schreiber's work at http://teachingdesign.blogspot.com/ and http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/. Especially the second one - its actually a free online course he taught last summer on game design. That should cover all the bases you need, and doesn't require any programming skills at all.

Choosing the iphone/pad/pod leading to limiting future choices is the issue here.

Advocates for choice generally aren't big on having choice at point A eliminate the possibility to make choices at points B-G. That's what Apple has done.

The majority of the computing world doesn't work like this. You have a choice of hardware. A choice of OS. A choice of different softwares for internet browsing, word processing, music playing. The iplatform has a proven track record of limiting the software that competes with its own developed applications.

The App(le) store as the only legal avenue to buy software for the platform is a step away from consumer choice, and consequently a step back in computing.

Ummm, NO.

The government would include all the informaton that they know already and then you would fill in the rest =- the way this is set up, they don't put your taxes to pay in there. You are responsible to add in what else you earned, just like today.

"In the economic sense" the idea of a 'real price' at the junction of supply and demand is a farce. Read Dan Ariely's Preditably Irrational

Whether its collusion among publishers, affection of a reader, or the limit of time to shop, too many non-economic factors effect the personal decision to buy a book.

Publishers are trying ot take advantage of the predictable irrationalities of purchasers. For example, I have noted that paper backs are now showing u pin two sizes - the same story, but one book is 6 inches tall and the other is 9 inches tall. Font size makes up the difference inside. The taller book is ~$3-5 more expensive. This is a great example of too expensive. And that discounts the regular upward price pressure of inflation that economists suggest is necessary for business to work at all.

In short, economic arguments are cute theory and all, but have little place in discussing the real life action of humans.

Do they need to be? It's not like writers/artists/musicians are traditionally known for understanding the business of publishing music/art/literature. They just know how the system screws them.

Let's see - the artists feel screwed. The purchaser feels screwed. Hmm... maybe the distributes are screwing both of them in order to squeeze money out of both ends?

This entire side conversation proves the merit of books - no one is arguing over the mechanics of figuring out how to turn pages on a 75 year old book. The format is lasting.

The real issue is that the book is still a great design and that ebooks are trying to sell electronic delivery devices, not information.

It's clear that most of the people posting so far are code monkeys or some other key-whackers/

Call me a Luddite, but learning to write without a computer is as important as learning to add without a computer - that is, essential.

Also, I recall a conversation about touch interfaces where /.ers were saying it was a useless fad because the keyboard and mouse were the height of usability. Teach cursive, give kids touch enabled computers, and the physical keyboard will fade into oblivion.

Which is why economics is fundamentally flawed. It takes apriori a model of humanity that is inaccurate and bases the entire discipline on it.

Go read Arielly or Kahnemena and Tversky and understand that human decision making is flawed by consistent, predictable behaviors that counter the economic definition of rational.

You know what makes a game interesting? Good Design.

Sure, many kids educational games suck, but would you not ask a large group of architects how to build a house because so many suburban houses are crap?

Ask this question on twitter #gamedesign
A group of people with deeper expereince than here will have some thoughts on it.