Google gets no details from them in school. There are quite strict FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) regulations protecting the privacy of kids in school. Part of the reason that Google has won classrooms is that they are willing to put the dev time into security and anonymizing Chrome for schools. Though this is all about cost for school districts, a lawsuit over FERPA violations is part of the cost calculation. That said, ten years of learning to trust Google buys habits and loyalty, so when they step out of the protection of school, they will be open and innocent to the corporate surveillance that follows. Its the same smart investment in future customers that Apple once subsidized but then ditched.

The RPi and Arduino are popular because they are easy to get started with and well supported. 95% of users want to just make a project without the hassle of compiling and flashing, trying to read badly translated Chinese, or getting stuck with no official help or community to draw on. The RPi community (online tutorials, instructables, youtube videos, forums, books) are vastly more important than the specifications. Arduino is the same. You can easily find cheaper boards with more power, but they always come with more frustration and time suck. There are only two ways to break into this market, either 1) Throw lots of money at creating a community, which is what Intel is doing with the Galileo, Edison, and Curie; or 2) Make it so much cheaper that it attracts its own community (which might be happening with the $9 CHIP computer). Otherwise, a product like this is fighting with several hundred other boards (just look at the linuxgizmos site) for a few percent of the market going to hard core hardware hackers.

Looking for something I could give my sister, so what is the best no-hack, off-the-shelf solution?

This is not only true of hard sciences. As a male professor in the arts, I have also seen little or no leeway for those with kids. Short of making my wife give up her career (which we wouldn't really be able to afford anyway) to take care of the kids, I faced the choice of making tenure at a second tier institution or failing tenure at a first tier university. When I go to major conferences, 95% of the successful academics (less than 50 years old -- forand is right that there is a generational difference) don't have children. In fact, there is a pretty clear rule for success: if you are male, don't have children, and if you are female, don't get married either. Consider some of the impacts of this: 1)university professors and leaders in science and the arts end up with no understanding of issues of parenting in their students, employees, or research subjects; 2) the best educated people in our society don't procreate and, given that parental education is the best predictor of a child's success in school, that screws the next generation; 3) the bright people who want kids avoid academia and science entirely which leaves these fields less bright than they would be otherwise -- do we really want fewer smart people in these fields? This is not a gender issue, it is an investment in the future issue.