I am looking at building a stick pc or a little raspberry pie, small computer, to be a Linux for kids & education. Any help or options that are out there for a newbie. I will be connecting this to a nexdock 14 inch touch screen extension.
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Definitely go for the Raspberry Pi! It’s aimed at and developed for kids (of all ages, mind!) to discover computing and especially programming. Have a browse on their website to learn more. Once they’ve grasped that, then they can develop ('xuse the pun 
) into the Arduino platform, followed by the more basic (in programming terms) PIC and C80 family of microcontrollers.
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I agree with using a Raspberry Pi if you want something fairly straightforward.
They are relatively cheap, have a plethora of documentation, and plenty of add-ons you can use. The Raspberry Pi website has walkthroughs for a lot of things you can do with a Pi.
Another option would be to find a used Thinkpad or something similar and throw something like Ubuntu or Mint on it.
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If you want a cool programming project, buy or build an LED cube and let the kids program those. It’s easier than it looks, especially if the kids only write one function (runLEDProgram() or whatever).
Something like this:
And the code the kids would be required to write would be something like:
void runLEDProgram() {
// Chase Purple LEDs over a single row
for (x in range(0,8)) {
setLEDColor(x,0,0,255,0,255,255); // x,y,z,r,g,b,brightness
setLEDColor(x-1,0,0,255,0,255,0); // turn off brightness on previous one
sleep(100); // Wait 100 ms
}
}
Of course you could then complicate it further, but I think this is a great way to visually teach kids about programming. Bonus points if you can hook up an X-Box controller and let them program simple games (blue dot eat green dots but die on red dots for instance), it’s quite fascinating how fun it can get with only a few LEDs… 