There are a ton of RP2040 boards out there and I expect a new wave of the RP2350 boards any day now. My current favorite board is this https://minifigboards.com/product/fig-pi/ since it has JST/SH connectors to add things vs a protoboard.

What are your development environments? I work with students ages 12 and under, so I try to keep things simple.

I do Circuit Python since I bought into that ecosystem with Adafruit awhile ago. Micropython is also a good environment.

I recently stumbled across the MaxiMite Basic. I had these boards a long time ago, and it was cool to see the port to the RP2040. https://geoffg.net/picomite.html There is a neat editor that made MixMite basic easy to write that also works with the RP2040 port.

I'm also a Lua fan, there is a nice port of Lua, https://github.com/MicroLua/MicroLua

Lastly, Forth was one of the early languages I learned for the 8008/8080 family. The Mecrisp-Stellaris Port is nice, it's got lots of great "words" to use with the RP2040. I like how they have displays for the GPIO pins that make it easy to look at all of them to be able to debug complex interfaces. https://mecrisp.sourceforge.net/

What are you using for RP2040 development? Thanks!

With kids id probably try Arduino. I personally prefer c and make/cmake/meson

Still the good ol' Arduino IDE for regular stuff and I've been dabbling in going full platform.io but change is hard

gcc, make, no sdk and no libc. baremetal all the way, yeehaw

Jetbrain's CLion with the pico sdk. Yeah, that means C.