Not to be a douche, but why couldn't you simply use a student version of 3ds max/maya, blender, gimp, and Unreal Development Kit, or CryEngine 3 SDK (or something similar, Unity, etc.)? The hardest part of all this would be the resource database, like textures, 3d models, scripts to avoid having to program themselves, etc. If they are going to be forced to do all that themselves, there are enough free things out there that they could already do it.

Again, nothing against your idea, I'm just curious as to why you want to do it if the tools already exist, unless I am misunderstanding your purpose. I mean yeah, you'd have all the tools in one package, but if you simply rar'd up the installation files of the programs I mentioned above, they'd all be in one package too.