I think the students are doing more "system integration" work than your factory workers are doing with their day-to-day handling. So they're touching all of the GPIO pins immediately after shuffling across the carpet to rub 18 balloons against themselves, connecting every GPIO pin to every other GPIO pin just for fun, rebooting by unplugging the power, etc.

If the Raspberry Pi had 5V compatible GPIO and SD cards stored data permanently immediately after fsync() returns, the Pi would have been much more successful in the educational environment.