Aquaone Nano 40 Set Up

Tank instructions are usually not very helpful, and neither are most shops.

The stress coat is needed, you should add it straight away. It removes the chlorine or chloramine added by the water company to kill bacteria in the water supply. It will also kill the bacteria you want to grow in the filter and when you have fish it will irritate them too. It should be added when the tank is first set up, then to the new water whenever you do a water change.

Quick start is a bottled bacteria product. Unfortunately it contains the wrong species of one of the two bacteria. There are only two products that contain the right one because the companies that make them have copyrighted the use of the correct bacteria so no-one else can use it.
Shops always ridicule fishless cycling. Either they don't understand it or they are afraid their customers won't understand it. I would strongly recommend you do a fishless cycle; because it is a classroom tank, will you have access to it at weekends and holidays? If you use the quick start you may well find you have to do daily water changes which could be a problem at weekends. You can use the quick start, if it helps it will speed things up. The danger is that you could add the quick start, the shop then does the tests and tells you to get fish, but without fish or ammonia from a bottle, the tests will show good results - until you add the fish. If the quick start has done nothing, you will then find yourself doing a fish-in cycle, which requires daily water changes, sometimes several changes a day if there are a lot of fish.
My advice would be to get a liquid reagent test kit (cheaper on-line) and a bottle of ammonia from the cleaning section at Homebase or from Amazon/Ebay. The follow the instructions in the filtration and cycling section here

Fish - provided you avoid fish that are known to do better if soft alkaline water, you should be OK. Though choosing fish that like hard alkaline water is better. With a cube shaped tank you need to avoid fast swimmers as they need a fair amount of horizontal room to zoom about in.
If you like bright fish, have a look at endlers. If you shop around you should be able to find several different pattern types. But males only. Livebearers like endlers breed worse than rabbits and while it would be educational for the pupils, you'd soon be very overstocked. Besides, the females are plain grey 
Another choice would be guppies, again only males, but they are more delicate than endlers.
Golden pencilfish aka beckford's pencilfish would be OK, they do have red in them
Fish of the pseudomugil genus - the most common ones are P gertrudae, P signifer and P furcatus. They would be better in a longer tank but they could be OK in yours. Have a look at the website seriously fish for their profiles.
Scarlet badis (Dario dario) though they can be picky feeders.

Just a few suggestions 

aquadvisor has a terrible reputation. Have you looked at the community creator on here? Go to fish profiles, click on any fish and down at the bottom of each profile is the CC. You do have to register then log in separately from the forum to be able to save your info - use your email address not your user name.

Thanks for your advice. The more I think about it the more I think I should go fishless... The kids will be gutted tho'. ColinB can you remember how long your fishless cycle took? I'd really like to get fish before the summer holidays!!
Also Colin - the fish you list are the ones in your nano?
I had my eye on Galaxy Rasboras (5or6) and some little corys (5 or 6) at the bottom. Plus maybe 3 dwarf mollies or a gourami. What do you think?
I will also check out the community tool - thanks.

Thanks Sue. I've been onto the fish profile section here and got a few more ideas. It seems you were right about aqua advisor as the opinions are very different! Panda corys sound OK for my tank based on the profile here. For some reason, I am completely smitten by the corys...I may have to get my own (bigger) tank!
5 band barbs look like they might be suitable too?
What is the new (quicker!) method of fishless cycling please?

Take a peek at the sticky on the filtration and cycling section. You will find the new method there. I'm doing my first ever tank cycle too.

Sue, your version of the fishless cycle is very clear and straightforward - I actually understand it now...I think...
The only problem is I'm planning a short holiday in about 4 weeks. Will all my bacteria die off if I don't give them a dose of ammonia for a few days?

Hi I also have a aqua nano 40 aquarium. Just a quick top tip regarding its filtration... Cut the large black sponge in half, that way its far easier to remove in the future for filter maintenance.

Puffin, do you know if your water is soft or hard? Loubaa's is hard and alkaline which restricts the kind of fish that are suitable. There are more fish that would go nicely in this tank that prefer soft acid water.

One of the things I've done with the Cube40 is to cut the black filter sponge right down to about 2" thick. Then I've bought a sheet of white filter floss to cut to size to put under the black sponge, and then bought some more filter media (Biohome Ultimate) to put in a net bag inside the first filter chamber below the sponges.

I only did this last week so there's little to report, but I was finding the sponge had clogged so much that it was restricting water flow through the filter. There's much better flow now.

However; I have noticed my Nitrate reading go up slightly and I wonder if the sponge had a lot of Nitrate eating bugglies in it. I know it takes several months for Nitrate bugglies to get established and that sponge was two years old. I will keep an eye on it and report back.

I'm also in the process of doing other things with the tank to reduce the amount of brown algae, but I'm only 10 days into that so will report back at the end of the month - but encouraging signs so far.

Hi
Thanks for the advice, Sue. I'm only away for 4 days max so I think I'll manage. I'd like to add some real plants and stones. Can I use slate and/or beach pebbles if I clean them thoroughly?

I tested some of my tap water today having left it to stand overnight and my GH degrees reading was 8, which I have read is classed as medium? Is that right? If so my water may be softer than I thought.

Puffin - Sue directed me to seriously fish which I have found really useful and also I've had lots of fin playing with the community creator!!

Colinb and Daniel - at the risk of sounding stupid, do you mean cutting the sponge to half it's depth, not length?

Hey - where did my reply go?

Sue's answered a lot of what I replied, so just about the sponge.....

I've cut mine to about 2". It still squeezes into the space at the back, but the water only travels through 2" of sponge on it's way through from top to bottom.