At Dartmouth College, the author teaches a course called "Security and Privacy." Its early position in the overall computer science curriculum means the course needs to be introductory, and the author can't assume the students possess an extensive computer science background. These constraints leave the author with a challenge: to construct meaningful homework assignments that expose relatively inexperienced students to the security and privacy issues pervading the electronic society. Rather than tackling the highly technical issues buried deep within the infrastructure, the author started with assignments that focused on the edges: the IT that students use and encounter in their daily work. Besides making the assignments accessible, this focus made the security issues tangible--the risks affect what the students use now and what they will use when they go out into the real world. In the past few years, they have looked at issues involved in hidden data in Word documents, password practices, and the paradigm shift from tethered to wireless networking. This article describes what students discover and provides those in campus IT environments instructive insights about security issues. (Contains 8 endnotes.)