[JamesAn]

One of the operating systems that may be ported to the Pi is RISC OS, which includes a reasonably decent implementation of BASIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC) which itself contains a built-in ARM assembler.

A student could quickly and easily start writing graphical programs (plotting randomly coloured circles onscreen, for example) or simple games, without needing to download, install and use a compiler.

We're literally returning to the world of 10 PRINT "Hello" : 20 GOTO 10... in the good "very accessible programming" sense, not the bad "...considered harmful" sense.

[moomin]

Also, if you wanted to learn bare-metal programming, the entire RISC OS Api was defined in terms of assembler. It's not open source, though.