I have not seen any comments as to how well Dart works with JQuery and JQueryUI, I have found these tools allow me to actually make javascript and client side programming actually work.

How about a whole team of heros. See http://www.usfirst.org/ While I do not like everything about the program, the students really do catch some of the excitement of science and engineering.

The two knob etch-a-sketch has a very long history. Connect two or more of them together via a network link. Then see if pairs of participants cooperate on a design.

I may have missed if someone else raised this point. Graphics editor is not the same as photo editor. I have been using GIMP to produce reasonable quality hiking maps. Here the ability to separate content by layers is critical. Contour lines, road and streams, my GPS data, and finally text anotation, each have their own layer. For example see: Resulting JPEG http://www.jtphillips.com/NBATC/MainTopPriest.jpg GIMP file http://www.jtphillips.com/NBATC/MainTopPriest.xcf

In 1992, we had ultrasonic inspection software running under HPUX. The improving performance of PCs made the HP hardware and HPUX licence way over priced. Others in our group had lost a half year trying to port to Windows. I ported the entire application to Redhat 4.2 in about a week and never looked back.

The "problem" that seems to plague all email systems is that they wind up being used as a replacement for a non-existing network file system. Users share ten's to hundred's of copies of the same word file. (If you think hundred's is hyperbole, the administration at the community college broadcasts announcements and then the group admins re-broadcasts the same.) No one deletes email because they cannot save/retrieve files as they move from one computer to another. Before picking an email system, pick a network file system with portable home directories.