Thanks for the reply and nice board by the way.

I want my students to make the development board themselves and not use and existing one. Instead I am trying to ask and see what a good PIC model would be to use as the base for the board and what kind of features would be beneficial to them to have included on board.

I was thinking something with Ethernet, USB, Can etc. built in so they can experiment with just about anything. We have our own PCB fabricating machines at the school so they will be doing the layout and fabrication themselves.

So far the only things I can think of adding are the following:

SD/MMC card reader (or maybe compact flash)
USB Host controller (like the one from FTDI)
USB Slave interface
PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
LCD Display port (for character and graphic displays)
Matrix Keypad
Serial RS232/RS485 ports
On board Bluetooth and ZigBee
Ethernet or WiFi (using the XPort modules or built in Ethernet)
Gameport (for connecting joysticks)
Optical isolated Inputs/Outputs and/or relays
DAC and ADC modules
EEPROMS and/or flash memory
RTC

We considered adding a USB PIC programmer but all students are given a PICKIT2 so we will just add an ICSP port compatible with it.

I haven't been able to figure out what PIC to use that would be able to give us all this and yet still work with PicBasic. If you can think of which one may work I would be greatfull.

Thanks