Setting up the toolchain that's not Arduino IDE is a prohibitively high bar for a school child that wants to blink leds.

There is a version of Thonny[1] designed for use with the Pico that is great for education. Raspberry Pi have some good resources on getting started[2].

If your target audience is school kids, you really can't go past the micro:bit and Makecode[3].

1. https://thonny.org

2. https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started...

3. https://makecode.microbit.org

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation also make a web-based Python Editor at https://python.microbit.org which is designed to be a supportive introduction to text-based coding and physical computing with no installation, friendly error messages and device simulation

Yeah their IDE is basically unusable.

And yet that is the only thing, that they actually produce. Everything is else is from someone else.

I am endlessly thankful for the Arduino project as it was one of the major gateways to programming for me, but at the same time, I bought an Arduino R4 and have barely even used it. ESP32, Raspberry Pi, and even 8 bit Atmel chips get way more attention from me. I'm guessing that Renesas chip on the R4 won't be getting too much attention anymore.

And if you poke a bit around, not even that was really of their own making: http://arduinohistory.github.io/ . There also has been some discussion about that here on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009209, which was less than a month ago.