Using experienced students in a programming class can be useful or daunting to the uninitiated. In my only programming class (high school) we were taught BASIC. Of course, I already knew BASIC from my old Timex Sinclair and Commodore 64, and there were a few guys who learned fast. We were 'Group 2', the advanced programming group. Essentially, we got to download shareware stuff for MS QBasic and take them appart, and every week or so, we'd report to the teacher. This was fun, and we often did large projects with one person coding the main loop, and everyone else pulling together the subroutines and functions.

Unfortuntatly, this intimidated the other students, and they shied from programming as a whole - they couldn't see how we got to where we were from where they were. But eventually we went on to become tutors for the other students - much better classroom dynamic.

I think having the class work on a program as a group would be fun - and a text adventure would be engaging without being too difficult. I think another advantage would be that you could avoid the problem my class had and still engage the advanced students - by giving them the more complex sections of code they get to both cooperate and work at their own level. This also gives all the students a chance to proof each others code and improve it, leading to better debugging skills.

I think also an advantage of this progect is learning code reuse AND learning not to trust anyone's code - useful if they start downloading CGI programs! Or worse, trying to learn from some of them!