This academic year (starting September 2013), the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (where I obtained my BSc and MPhil degrees) gave a Raspberry Pi to each new undergraduate as part of their welcome pack. Steve Pettifer, one of the academics behind the project, has described the rationale and how things have been going so far in a trio of blog posts:
The project hasn’t run for a full year yet, so it’s a bit early to judge the level of success, but hopefully it will inspire students to try new things both inside and outside the syllabus.