Awesome project, re fpga implementation one option you might want to explore are used Bitcoin miner control boards if you want the best logic units/$ ratio. I've used the EBAZ4205 (zynq 7010) control boards with a cheap/generic FT2232HL dev board and it works great. Of course it's a bit more of a pain compared to a regular dev board
If they are taking digital design classes, they'll probably be given something like a DE0-Nano that can run this just fine.
If I tell what we got for our projects you would be disappointed at my university. We get nothing not even a single FPGA kit is available in the whole department.
This is a nice idea! I never knew of this will look into it. Actually our university did not even provide us with chips to make breadboard version we had to source everything ourselves.