I took a general game development overview course for people who knew nothing about anything (meant in that it was a 100 level course, so it was filled with first year CS students and 1st year artists) in which we designed a game and dealt with lots of the pieces of the puzzle. I would not recommend it. The danger you fall into is that you try to do everything and in doing so fail at all of it.

Making a game takes a lot of skills that are not trivial to learn. If you want them to make games, then have the focus on honing the skills to make them. If you want them to learn about games, then focus on teaching them about the process of making them in a real environment. You probably won't have time to do both meaningfully.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that I already knew what I wanted to do so I didn't really care about the other stuff, or maybe to do with that I knew most of the other stuff (a good amount of information is just available on the internet via gamastura, altdevblog, or tsloper's site).

If I could recommend something I think doesn't get enough press, have them design board games. A lot of lay people don't realize how easily board games extrapolate to video games, and they require far fewer technical skills but keep a lot of the similarities everywhere else (game design, testing, law, publishing, etc).

edit: on second recollection it was a 200 level course, but it had the same problem.