Ask HN: Examples of real life like projects I could use in mentoring

A bit of context : I'm a seasoned IT professional (with a management / enterprise architecture background) and when I get the chance I use some of my spare time to help inexperienced people (usually college level or just out of college kids of my friends) with advice and a bit of mentor-ship on what they should learn so that they complete their academic knowledge with skills required in the real world. I've been doing it so far for software development. I basically come with an idea of a small project and ask them to develop, recommend techniques, review their code, approach, do some Skype office hours, etc. It's not a big effort for me, I do it for the good citizen effect and I helped them learn useful things and get jobs. In software development only, though.

The question : I have 2 new "students" which reached out to me for a professional reconversion and it seems that targeting an analyst profile is the best fit as they lack any technical background and at least in Europe is a good entry point in the IT world. I built up some sort of a curricula but I face a challenge: this exercise is really helped by actual challenges and there is only that much "do a use case diagram for somebody getting money out of an ATM" type of small challenges I can give them. Has anyone been facing a similar issue or would care to throw some idea of meaningful projects I could get them working on to develop analyst type of skills they could later use to get a real job ? Again, the challenge is not really inventing a project ("write specs and gather requirements for a job board") but inventing a project that is meaningful and requires little interaction (I don't have the time to impersonate all the different persona they would have to interact with : stakeholders, managers, architects, developers, etc..)