Regarding Raspberry PI and schools...

"Adafruit Industries has published a new Linux distribution called "Occidentalis" for hardware hacking and teaching electronics using the ARM-based Raspberry Pi mini-computer. Its developers say that they decided to create Occidentalis because Raspbian – a Debian-based distribution released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation last month – didn't include many of the tools and software components that most hardware hackers would need. "

--source: http://h-online.com/-1660567

Cheers, Peter