Duckietown is based on ROS. You can assemble the robot and control it easily from ROS on your laptop (note that the stack runs on board completely).
For new hardware: we have in beta a Drone version of Duckietown for the high school: https://sites.brown.edu/duckiesky/ The Drone MOOC will arrive in time.
thanks for pointing out the 404, it should be fixed now.
The city track for the MOOC is currently bundled with the Duckiebot in the MOOC starter kit (https://get.duckietown.com/collections/starter-kits/products...). You'll need both to follow along in the course.