Recommendations for purchases

[CalTran]

Well, if you have the resources, you could invest in researching drive trains. It's useful for the competition, and if you get one that your students really love then they can already have a general drive base year to year. Perhaps something that you can place "drive modules" into so you can trade drives quickly and get your students practiced in a variety of them.

[BrendanB]

If you haven't already I'd recommend investing in some 80-20 extrusion and fasteners. It makes prototyping a breeze and once you decide on a final configuration it is easy to switch out for box aluminum.

[AllenGregoryIV]

When I was in high school we had a course that covered multimedia engineering. It was mostly applied digital signal processing. I thought it was very interesting. It was through the Infinity project but I imagine you could come up with something similar.

If I had money to spare I think it would go with a CNC Router/plasma cutter.