well you'd be much better off using one of the mks boards. That way all the existing firmware will just load up and it will already know what to do with the gcode.

Unless you intend to write custom firmware for things like ups functionality, there's not actually that much programming involved.

Though that does of course depend on what type of printer your group intends to make, and whether it'll just be a printer or have laser engraving and cnc functionality as well.

But I think you'll find that others have been there before and already done the bulk of the work. And the vast majority is in the public domain :-)