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You might consider going thru each part of libGDX Audio/Gfx/Files/Input/Life cycle and talk about how they are fundamental to game creation or something.

I highly recommend Mario's book, he goes into detail about each of these in the context of Android. You might mention it to the class. Honestly even if they aren't interested coding in Java or even Android, it still an amazing book on how to code a game in general.
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Android-Games-Mario-Zechner/dp/1430246774/

Check this book: https://www.amazon.com/Libgdx-Cross-platform-Game-Development-Cookbook/dp/1783287292.yes it's outdated, but it teaches most things in detail, i never had any issues with it, most things are applicable with the latest version of libgdx.

Being an android developer should make learning libgdx a lot easier for you, good luck!.

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Libgdx-Development-Andreas-Oehlke/dp/1782166041 i think is the best now. I purchased it. It's wrote about 0.9.7 but you can port to 1.0 very easy.

I'm currently following the "Libgdx Cookbook" and am loving it. You might run into a few hiccups with IDE's, but it should be easy enough to google those.

I'm the developer of Mirage Realms (www.miragerealms.com) which is an MMORPG written using LibGDX and I also had absolutely no idea wtf I was doing when I started.

I looked into Kryonet as another user has suggested but in the end found I wanted to know a lot more about networking so ended up just writing my own stack. The book that helped me was Java Network Programming https://www.amazon.co.uk/Network-Programming-Elliotte-Rusty-Harold/dp/1449357679 which I mainly used as a reference for TCP sockets and streams - if that's what you need.

The first steps are really figuring out if you are going TCP or UDP, and if you are going to have a hard split between client / server or not. An example of a hard client / server would be world of warcraft or counterstrike. An example of a soft server would be something like quake 2 where the host client is effectively the server.

There is also platform to consider, if you are going for a networked game on mobile phones you are going to have lag and are going to have to figure out ways of working around it via either interpolation or some other means. It's not all packet loss and internet speeds either, the radios in phones suck and you have some random milliseconds of delay just getting the incoming data from the radio depending on how it is currently power cycling, so if its really time critical you can forget the overheads of reflectively looking up packet handlers and such.

If you are just on the PC, life is easy and you can take serious liberties given how fast peoples machines and internet connections generally are these days.

TLDR;

Sounds dumb but figure out what you want before starting anything in terms of a basic architecture and network requirements. Learn the trade-offs between TCP and UDP. You can then focus your time on finding tutorials that fit those requirements i.e. googling "thread per connection TCP server socket" will give you much more to work with than googling "how to make a multiplayer game"!

Liam