Parts
There are a variety of places you can get parts and gizmos to work with your projects.
Our official, local, and highly recommended supplier is Mountain States Electronics on College Avenue near Whole Foods. They have kindly offered a major discount on all of their stock. Just tell them you are working with this competition for the discount. This will be your best bet to get small components and supplies like circuit boards, switches, lights, wire, and such. They also sell TTL logic chips (for those of you who like logic design) which are hard to find.
www.Jameco.com and www.Digikey.com are large parts distributors. These are great for individual parts like resistors, LED's, motors, transistors, and such. While these guys are convenient, you should buy what you can locally and only order specialty items when necessary. Components are light enough that your shipping will be $6 whether you buy your LED's and transistors locally or not (ie shop locally if you can).
www.SparkFun.com has got a wide variety of modules, kits, and breakout boards for more of a "lego" approach to making electronics. Occasionally, it is cheaper to buy modules from them than it is to buy the parts to make the modules. Do your shopping however - parts like LED's and transistors and much more expensive here. A plus here is that they are based in Boulder, so shipping is fast (or you can pick up your order).
www.AdaFruit.com is similar to Sparkfun. It has many kits and things that will get your imagination rolling around in your skull. Definitely take a look.
www.Radioshack.com (as well as the retail outlet) is generally more expensive than the above, but some things like blank circuit boards are much cheaper. The location in the Foothills Fashion Mall has the best selection in town for your purposes.
Code and Programming help
The main site to look at for technical help, code, and more is Arduino.cc. There is an open-wiki that has a great documentation of nearly everything you might ever hope to do.
Project ideas, help, and CHEAP PARTS
There are several different places you can go if you get absolutely stuck and starved of ideas. Beware - do not adopt someone else's project or work as your own. It will be found out, and you will be disqualified if you do.
www.Instructables.com has great tutorials for wiring and programming as well as a host of projects done by fellow hobbyists. Another great resource - you can find out how to harvest parts from used electronics like motors, LED's, LCD's, and more which will save you a lot of money. Please note that adopting another's project, code, or schematics as your own results in immediate disqualification.
www.HackADay.com is a user submitted "hacker" blog where people hack electronics and make something new. It has similar content to Instructables but is more focused on electronics.
For more cheap parts, you can search around different manufacturer's sites and get free samples of processors, LED's, and such.
Copyright
You may want to copyright your code (or have to in some circumstances). I'd recommend starting here: http://creativecommons.org/choose/.
Copyright
You may want to copyright your code (or have to in some circumstances). I'd recommend starting here: http://creativecommons.org/choose/.
