I should get round to submitting my updated version of the 'have a bunch of kids be logic gates & simulate a binary adder' exercise I found on the net a few years ago which has gone down really well the last few times I've run it.
I’ve tweaked the exercise a bit though, so I’ll see if I can get those changes written up - the original author gave us permission to use the work as we saw fit back when I worked at the Dept of Comp.Sci. in Oxford.