Hunt the Wumpus in Atlanta

I'm looking to recruit other software folks to help teach software engineering practices as part of our Hunt the Wumpus program.  This project is something that Microsoft has already been running in the Seattle area for several years, and I am looking to bring it to Atlanta.

You wouldn't have to be employed by or affiliated with Microsoft at all in order to help.  Here is how the program works.  We go to a local high school which runs an AP computer science class.  We ask the AP CS teacher to take a look at their students, and find the top 6 or so who really could breeze through the class since they know a lot already.  The CS teacher puts those students on an accelerated track, where they get done with the assigned classwork by late January or so.  Then, from approx. Feb through April (schedule depends on local AP testing schedule) we (this is where you come in) meet with the students once a week during their regular AP class time, and lead them through a software engineering project as a real project team.  The project is to build a "Hunt the Wumpus" game (you know HTW right? if not do a web search and you'll find it), complete with planning, individual implementation of the components, integration, testing.  The students will be using the .NET framework to build everything.  At the end, the students do a presentation about their project.  (If this really takes off we can have a local Wumpus competition like they do in Seattle, but I'm aiming for only a single school this inaugural year in Atlanta.)  Then we "give them back" to their AP CS teacher about a month before the AP exam, for final test preparation.

The Hunt the Wumpus project is something that Microsoft has already been running in the Seattle area for several years, and invested enough to develop a full professionally-produced curriculum.  We'd already have all the materials, schedule, lesson plans we'd need.  Your commitment would be 1 hour of classroom time each week from approx. Feb-April, plus probably some out-of-class time helping out the students on the side.  The official estimate is max. 5 hours per week, where really it's less than that after you get rolling.

I'm looking for people in Atlanta who would like to help the students, especially folks who know are familiar with C#/.NET but that is not a requirement.  And for fairness I should say, I myself am NOT a .NET programmer (yet).  I spend all of my time working with C / C++.  This would be the first year running this program in Atlanta but we hope to turn it into an annual event to inspire kids around the area to go into computer science.  Please contact me via my blog https://blogs.msdn.com/sloh/ if you would like to be involved.

Sue