[Todd]

Every year I try to move our team more and more into a compartmentalized and modular framework.

It's not always easy to find adult Software Engineer's who actually have a firm grasp of tasking and software architecture, much less high school students.

Greg ^^ has some great suggestions and I honestly don't have anything to add to them, but I can relay our personal experiences.

Over the past two years we've been using global data objects, using semaphores to handle mutual exclusivity, and our students have been able to grasp the concepts fairly well.

Next year I'd like to open them up to functional global variables, but there are trade offs to hold against having a code base that is too.. 'well established', since if most of the code is already written and doesn't need to be touched, then your students may not be able to learn how it truly works.

Once the current set graduate if we find ourselves lacking someone who really understands the whole framework, I fully intend to break the traditional set of rules I follow in the work place and throw what we have over the shoulder and willfully reinvent the wheel just to counter the above.