Hi @hpssjellis,
Glad to provide a superior developer experience for your students.
- “expensive Arduino PortentaH7”, yes, why do you use this board? We are software/hardware agnostic but this board is crazy expensive and is not intended for STEM/students.
- " cheap Seeedstudio XIAO which is not on Platformio", what are your course’s requirements? Have you looked at Espressif boards? They have good price and IoT functionality.