[acgourley]

This is great, while I've often thought I should go back to my college and bridge the glaring holes between the curriculum and reality, I never got much further than that.

Definitely alumni going back and helping their schools should be encouraged, and hopefully most dept's are humble enough to accept that help. But I worry it's a small thing that doesn't scale, have you thought about the growing online education movement as a vector?

[cfinger]

Definitely. This is kind of the test of my hypothesis, that doing these projects in the real world create a motivation that influences your school work, life, career, etc.

I've long thought that there should be a 'maker scholarship', giving small amounts of funding to people/students building real things. I found small amounts of this in the form of sponsorships from companies, but I really had to hustle for it. Whereas I randomly (literally just showed up in my mail) received a scholarship simply because my grades were above a certain mark. The 'Maker Scholarship' idea is definitely scalable.

As far as a new kind of school, I'm not sure the best way to do that. Certainly interested in all the online activity but I do like the social feel of a 'real life' school.

[acgourley]

Maybe there is some concept you can develop at one school that can spread to more. I'd also bet maker companies like sparkfun would be interested in sponsoring such things.

[meanderingleaf]

I teach programming in a university. We have to pull teeth to get alumni to come back to advise us, much less get them interacting with the students.