How about a Magic: The Gathering app (or some other such game)? -- Full disclosure: I don't play, but the kids seem to like it. :) -- You could write a server and clients. It seems like the kind of thing that could:
- Be up and running fairly quickly
- Be open-ended enough for continued tweaking
- Present a sufficiently varied set of tasks to be broken up into groups. (Adding new features to the server, porting the client to various OSes, and/or setting up a web interface both for players and for administrators, setting up a database for connections, tournaments, etc.)
Just a thought, which may turn out to be half-baked.
BCE
--Your punctuation skills are insufficient!