I am no expert, just a fan of science on TV and this solution reminded me of a (I think Nova) program I watched about Global Dimming. Essentially, an effect of more clouds in the air caused by the heating of global warming and the by-product of jet engine exhaust thereby dimming the earth by blocking the suns radiation. This lessens the water evaporation on the earth's surface and causes days to be dimmer. All of which would be a detriment to the earth's ecosystem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

I think I have a little different outlook on this answer. Relearning what you have already learned while getting your degree through remedial courses may cause this person to lose more interest, and, I do not subscribe to just picking up an open source project and learning it.

Instead, I believe investing more time learning different architectures or frameworks, and understanding how they benefit computer science or business. Examples being: Service Oriented Arch, Aspect Oriented Programming, Web framworks (Rails, Struts,...), gaming frameworks, et al. Having a thorough knowledge of these lets you concentrate more on building systems and not just mundane programming tasks. In my opinion, the people who know how to build systems are just as talented as the ones who can implement the complex algorithms. This also allows you to compare and contrast how these archs/frameworks are implemented in different languages and will make you more marketable when you go for that next job (which I also think you need to do) and may shed a different light on what you consider programming is.