I personally think that you're on the right track by choosing Unity.

With VERY little programming background I was able to make fully functioning games within my first few days. You can explain the basics in less that 5 hours and let them have at it creating, leaning, and most importantly enjoying game design.

It's very easy to start learning by using UnityScript, which is basically their version of Javascript.
The engine itself is very powerful and once they start getting the hang of UnityScript if you wanted to introduce a more rigid programming language you could do so with C# which is also supported by Unity.

Unity has been released for FREE so you should have no problem supplying it to your student. The Pro version has its pluses especially for stereoscopic stuff, but I don't think you'll be introducing that very early on. The free version will most certainly be enough for beginners and even intermediate students.

Did I mention the huge amount of resources available online for it:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Tutorials.html

The community is also incredibly helpful! I know because I've received plenty of help and guidance.

It's ideal for rapid prototyping which is what I tend to use it for, however it can serve as an excellent resource for learning game design and even programming without getting bogged down with the low level stuff.

Good Luck!

I found an article detailing this daily regiment of his. I don't know how good sleeping only 4 hours a night and getting nourishment from a powder composed of 55 essential nutrients is. Here it is: http://www.brainsturbator.com/articles/yoshiro_nakamatsu_we_salute_you/ Fascinating man.

Or for us Russians, 403,361,142,857 handles of vodka.

That reminds me just a little bit of Wall-E. Here's to hoping it never comes to that. I've spent plenty of time working in archives for a museum in Chicago and this is an interesting point that I've never really thought of. Here I am spending hours a day archiving manuscripts and scanning letters and signatures into digital to have for the future and safe-keeping but who will upkeep it in the future. Looking into it, this doesn't seem like that big of an issue. Digital media is so easy to transfer and copy at such high speeds... Its almost a wonder how we manage to know so much about those before us. Especially the way they used to transfer information (in candle-lit monasteries on flimsy paper). The way things are now, the future will know way more about us than we will ever know about those before us.

I'm glad you mentioned the MIT open courses. They are also not the only ones that do it! I started my way through their beginning courses in CS but I found it rather dry. After looking around a bit I found courses at Stanford as well: http://see.stanford.edu/ Found the lectureres more interesting and they have some sweet semester long courses on AI (from language processing to robotics). If you have the time check em' out. The resources available nowadays are amazing..

I think the issue is one of confidence. If you do math on a daily basis, or even have to count things as in this study on a daily basis with the knowledge that you must be right, you'll be more confident in your final answer because you're used to it. Put a guy from a machine shop that has to count 1000 drill bits before he ships them to make sure the shipping order is precise, and he'll top that study.

I can definitely see this type of thing helping the education system. Giving kids levels and achievements by grades.. I'm not talking A's, B's, and C's. Something to be learned from martial arts and gaining belts. Only being able to move on once you pass a certain degree of mastery. I think we're all a little too used to the boring and old ways of getting grades and moving on. It all seems to be too normal. This could be a way to get kids involved and create a little more pizzazz in learning and gaining "experience". Maybe let them wear little Orc avatars to their spelling bee's.

Privacy is dead, but the way things are going everything that really matters will be censored anyways. Things are going the wrong way for the internet these days...

That might actually lead to some stimulating discussion in that case. Depending on your social group that is.

So according to that article Aardvark gets some data on your own interests and whoever else uses it, then when you have a question it searches for users that fall in the realm of your question. The only problem I see here is that these are facebook/twitter/etc users. Is there some way the answers are verified? Or is this just a cha-cha/wikipedia-esque system?

Links to attack on Australian porn censorship! Mysterious group know as "Anonymous" still unavailable for comment!

How does a story like this even make it past editors? "Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." Seriously?