I've done this several times and a key point in nurturing interest over disdain in students is to place some additional, personalized learning in the project. If the student has a mathematical bent, I usually assign a Monte Carlo simullation of pi. It is amazing to see random "dart throws" and an easy calculation converging to pi, and it lends itself to a quick drawing, followed by a quick outline, followed by pseudo code, followed by short coding -- and it usually requires simple debugging to work out whether you need to use "" or "=". If the student is a tactile learner, find a device project like a Mindstorm kit, so they end up with a physical object to touch and control. And who doesn't need a little self-driving dump truck to distribute handouts up and down the rows? If they are artistic, perhaps explore pixel edge detection to create a line drawing from a photo. They will come away with keen insight into how images are stored and displayed. The key is that they use coding to DO SOMETHING THAT THEY PERSONALLY FIND VALUABLE. If you don't do this, then it will be just like forcing them to memorize the multiplication tables or diagramming sentences. Most students aren't inspired to go back to those particular assignments on their own. Our goal is to build internal interest so they will become life-long learners. One more thing I have done in small classes is to do a team project. (I did one with TI calculators.) you can negotiate who gets what subroutine and do all the preliminary teaching and organizing on the whiteboard and then turn the subroutines over to the students. When they transfer all the subroutines between themselves and see it all run, they feel like they have really done something, since the teacher didn't GIVE it to them. They also have to learn to aggressively test individually and then to debug as a team.

I was not aware before your post that HomePlug interfered in HF shortwave. Sorry about that. But from what I can read, "...miles around..." is a bit of hyperbole for my little condo all by itself. The issue seems to become important in places where there is a high degree of adoption or else when used in ACCESS mode -- that is, to deliver broadband over the main lines.

If I ever get the chance, I will of course look into the actual interference to HF in my neighborhood. But until then, if you notice me interfering with your HF CQ, I will be glad to switch to MoCA. But I doubt my neighbors will do the same, so the shortwave community is going to need a regulatory approach to solve this problem.

We live on the Ohio River and our 2.4GHz WiFi (all bands) was wiped out periodically just about every day for 10-15 minutes at a time. Neighbors all reported this, as well. I bought a WiSpy and patiently waited for a blackout to occur, then correlated them all to barge traffic on the river. Only then did I notice the big rotating antennae on the tugs. It is only a small leap of faith to determine that our problem is bleed-over from similar-spectrum Marine-band radar into the unlicensed 2.4GHz spectrum. Could have changed to 5GHz (where my phones operate unhindered) or coax-based MoCA, but I decided to try HomePlug-spec'd devices, which use AC house wiring to get encrypted 100Mbps throughput. My Linksys Powerline boxes can be plugged in wherever they are needed, have worked flawlessly, and I have a spare for when people come over to work with me. Still use WiFi around the place for maximum portability, but not for production-mode stuff.