The RPi is a teaching resource for programming, right?
Physical computing is a good model for teaching programming, because it rewards by making things happen (lights flash, motors move, whatever), right?
What bothers me is that these student programmers really don't get to know anything about what they are doing, because they simply call up predefined libraries to do the "heavy lifting" of waggling GPIO pins, with no visibility of the code that is operating in the background.
Yes, clearly you need an easy way in, but that could be provided by explicitly pasting in pre-written (rather than pre-compiled) functions. Students would then be free to modify these or write their own versions.
The point is that if they were to design their own hardware, they would be unable to program it to do something until somebody else wrote them a library call.
Back in the days I was designing peripheral circuits for computer systems, naturally stuff got done by putting data registers on a bus and writing or reading into/out of those registers (the output of a register would be logic levels which acted on further circuits to control their operation, and returning status information came back by reading other registers). The software department tasked an "engineer" to write their interface routines to control my hardware, so I provided a design specification for what all the bits in all the registers did, and the bus addresses at which to access them. All standard stuff.
The problem was that this "software engineer" didn't know what I/O was. Oh yes, he could code a pretty interface in Visual Basic that worked with standard OS GUI calls, but when it came to addressing specific registers and bit twiddling he hadn't a clue. I tried to explain that if you want to change just one bit in an 8-bit register you read it, XOR it with a mask to change just the relevant bit, then write the result back, but I just got a blank look. The software department fixed the problem by swapping out the defective unit.
That's what I'm worried about here. People are being spoon-fed by hiding the details inside libraries, and learning little or nothing other than to expect instant gratification.