This is a 2 part question. Just need short explanation for the answers.

1. Your local high school has challenged you to help them challenge their students by building such a Stone SouperComputer with them. No, they don't have all 128 of those old PC/XTs sitting around just yet... maybe only a dozen to start with. But if they can make it work with this year's students, they'd love to keep growing it. What sort of network design do you want to recommend that they look at -- knowing that none of them can afford to buy a 128-port switch or router right up front? How could your network grow to accommodate this project? Does allowing / encouraging the use of wireless as well as wired switches and routers help you do this, or only make things more complicated and run slower?
2. For that high school project, you want to help the students figure out how to take each piece of donated equipment and figure out what it can do, and what it cannot. Let's focus on the switches for a moment. What procedure might you lay out for them to determine which switches need to be connected with crossover cables to other switches, and which ones don't? Assuming that the manuals are not readily available for these switches -- and remembering that students don't always read everything they are given! -- how can students test a switch to see if it's working, and whether it needs crossover cables or just straight-through patch cables to interconnect?