Recently I heard Rabbi Jeff Fox give a shiur on this very issue. After a brief discussion of the halachot of electricity on Shabat, he went into his main point which was that kids who do this don’t get what Shabat is about and that we are failing to communicate the greatness of Shabat. He didn’t have any particular ideas except to say that if all Shabat is about is all the things you can’t do, of course kids will want to get out of it somehow.
At the end of the shiur, none of us (myself included) wanted to talk about his main point — we all wanted to discuss the halachot of electricity! He (justifiably) berated us for missing the point.