A few years back I participated in this contest that I thought I should share with everyone.
http://www.thinkquest.org
The basic idea is that teenagers (up to 19 I believe) build web pages on educational topics in groups of two or three under the mentorship of 1-3 adults who must be directly affiliated with a school. You'll have to read over the rules on the site to get the real thing because I haven't read the rules since I competed and they may have changed.
The reward makes the pain of building a web site with two other people worth it: $25,000 in a scholarship for college (for first place). True, this will only make a dent in the costs for some places, but that's not pocket change by any means. And I think that if you web developers out there go and take a look at the winning sites you'll see that you can probably at least make it into the finals.
Another quick thought: maybe teams who assign only a few students to build their site anyway would be willing to subject their time and energy to the constraints of such a contest. The result, if nothing else, could be a really educational robotics page that you'd be proud to post here.