Dave, I can’t help directly since I’m horribly time poor right now (and I don’t think IBM would allow me to anyway), but I am keen to see how you get on, since the area of educational applications for OpenSim is one of my interests.

Off the top of my head, is it not possible to adapt one of the grid oriented web interfaces to a standalone? In might require some extra exposure of OpenSim functionality in sandbox standalone, but I think we’d be happy to look at doing that if we can identify what’s required. Of course, it’s also quite possible that the existing web interfaces aren’t suitable for your needs anyway.