Re: How to Run a Magic School/College Game in D&D 3.5e?
I've run into a couple games involving schooling stuff before, and being familiar with Harry Potter and a couple systems, it's an interesting process to think about.
in D&D, magic schools were, on a basic level, places you went for several years to learn how to become the basics of a spellcasting wizard (So subadult character, 0 level, then onward to maybe 3rd or 4th level tops before you likely graduated as an acceptable wizard, if we're talking a big time school. Smaller scale 'home schooling' wizarding schools would be more 1st or 2nd level).
What students learned in that setting was basically the fine structure of how their spells worked, how to memorize them, channel the energy, etc. They learned spellcraft, knowledge arcana, maybe alcehmy - they covered the various angles of things that would be useful to a wizard, basically. your projects might be to brew a potion of some sort, identify appropriate plants and what spells they are common reagents for, or successfully zap the apple off the skeleton model's head in the corner. Graduating from there gave you the stepping stones to teach yourself further by studying other books, performing experiments, and basically creating your own work
ultimately, what those schools were for, for those just learning the basics, was 'How to not blow your own brains out when you sneeze during Magic Missile.'
Harry Potter is basically a very modernized concept of learning to be a wizard. You learned the basics as would be expected, but they help guide you and give you a safer environment to do your own study, and become a productive wizard that could take a job that would be useful - or you barely pass, or flunk out, and you help lil old witches with their reagent bags by scooping up those beetle eyes into their pouch. Harry Potter is elementary, intermediate, and college level stuff rolled into one big place on several years.
So, on its own like that, D&D doesn't really compare because spells per day is fairly limiting until you have several spell levels. Those teachers there can use lower spells to deal with problems students get into, and big spells when the potion hits the fan, but they don't expect to deal with more than one or two big issues at a time, if at all. That's why they have several teachers - so if something REALLY big happens, they have plenty of backup to try and keep their financial support safe.
This said, it's not to say the idea isn't doable, but the expectations of how magic flow works will be different in D&D than in Harry Potter.
I have dabbled in World of Darkness with mage. That does add a little more room for more intuitive magic stuff, but the type of magic each mage can pull off is a bit more restricted in style depending. If we're getting mana involved, one can run out of juice, but it might not be too much hassle to recharge. magic systems similar to Shadowrun where you gather fatigue can be more forgiving if you don't try to blow something up, but that is very rote-spell style there, so trickier.
That would leave another magic system from somewhere, or building one from scratch. I know there are a few others that are more free-flowing without uses per day attached to them, they just don't come to mind right at the moment.
But, putting aside the magic casting part for now, as far as figuring out things for players to try and help it stay interesting without being dulled by homework, you'd give them basic abilities they can definitely do, they can pick out a couple things they would have a knack for, and as the year progresses and they move on to other classes, those abilities steadily get better, expanding their reliability and/or features. Once they hit that point where they can diverge into more advance classes, they can have more unique abilities or options appear. If you want to make things like getting to class on time a factor... well, mentioning what they had ot do for detention and whatnot is a thing, and if it's a point that missing too many classes might get them expelled, it creates a background reason for why characters aren't just running off into the dungeon or the forbidden forest all the time 0 it's game over if they slack off too much!