Good plan Ken...and glad you are getting students involved.

I cannot comment on the language you quote since I have no experience with them. What you describe, however, sounds very well suited to the Basic Stamp. Look at the Parallax site and look for the Board of Education. This is a Basic Stamp processor with an integrated proto board and voltage supply/regulator. It comes with a Basic Stamp program editor and integrated USB programmer. There are lots of example programs and Parallax sells lots of sensors to interface to it. I actually started my RC truck project on a Basic Stamp. The major limitation was that it has limited program storage for lots of variables. But for simple programs, it is very adequate. they also have more advanced Propeller systems as well. The nice thing about the Basic Stamp is that if you want to go more sofisticated on a PIC, you can get the PICBasic compiler (this site) and the programs port with little changes.

The competition you describe sounds very challenging. Depending on what the obstacles are in the lobby, you may run into some serious navigation issues. An arbitrary course with chairs, tables, cabinets etc would require a great deal of sophistication to navigate. You could put some "clues" in there, such as bright LEDs or something a simple detector can locate and navigate to. If you think of tight turns with an RC car, it requires backing up, turning, etc. hard to do completely autonomously, but not impossible.

I strongly recommend you take a good look at the Basic Stamp. Easy start up, few extra components, relatively cheap (you might get an education discount), simple sensors, and lots of programs out there to build on. It is also an easy step to upgrade to a more complex PIC system from there.

John