If you want the benefits of distributed version control with a very simple user interface I'd highly recommend giving Mercurial a try.

A great introduction to Mercurial for people familiar with SVN can be found here http://hginit.com/. Mercurial also has Tortoise HG (http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/) if you want a GUI interface.

SVN to Git is going backwards. At least go to another distributed vc.

If your interns got confused on their own, they could use some direction. As interns.

I still get tense when I think about SVN merging.

I meant Git to SVN is backwards.

there's also http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/ similar with TortoiseSVN.

Thanks, that's a big help. Is there any way to foolproof in git? In SVN unless you get rid of the repository on the server directly (which most users don't have access to), everything is saved so work isn't lost (as long as you check in). According to point number 7 on: http://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-abo... a user can potentially blow everything away with no clear way to recover, is this something to be concerned about or can failsafes be easily built in so this doesn't happen?

You can set up a script that will auto push to a remote repo on commit, the confusion comes in with the terminology in most distributed systems commit just means tell my local source control to track the change, where as in the centralized model commit generally means move these changes to the server. Just remind them that nothing gets to the server without a push. distributed systems have serious advantages over the centralized model, specifically when it comes to getting everybody's changes merged together in a chronological order. That advantage far outweighs the learning curve. If you use Mac's I would recommend SourceTree it is a very good UI for GIT and HG.