in reply to Help with game

The best "Internet Adventure Game" I could suggest (without seeming to be exceedingly self-centered in attending to my own likes etc.) is Ultima Online. You could have a server on your school network running an Ultima Online POL server. There's tons of server scripts that are written in a language similar to C/JavaScript, and I bet it would be hell lot of fun working on your own game scripts to enhance/modify the gameplay in any way you see fit.

At a high-school I was attending, we ran a CS club where the only thing we did is solve some Math problems with C/Pascal. In retrospect, I think having had something like this would have been rather great.

Also, there's a way for one to write Perl scripts to interact with the POL server (I think it's possible, though not announced in any official way ;-) and spit out certain game info on the web.

Of course, for simplicity's sake, you may just resort to something like NetHack... but I, for one, would prefer UO over this alternative.

Besides, reading as you know nothing but a little bit of Perl, you might as well give your students an opportunity to practice their 'hacker' skills at scripting the UO POL server. Here're some links for you:

"There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." -- Confession of Faith