I agree with Heather that the answer will vary.

How old are the kids?  
Are they a rookie team?
Do they practice year-round or just the ~10 weeks between the start of the school year and the VA/DC regional qualifiers?  
How much equipment does the team have?

My teams are rookies, made up from 4th- and 5th graders (i.e. 10 year olds).  One robot set (base + expansion) per team.  
They meet once a week starting two weeks ago and will keep going until the November qualifiers. 

This year I had the teams start with the basic robot from the printed instructions that come in every Lego Education EV3 base kit.  
As the season progresses, they will be modifying/improving their robots, and by November I fearlessly predict that each team will have a completely unique robot which will bear little resemblance to what they started with.

For my teams and their circumstances, this seems to work fairly well so far.  They will spend their remaining practice time split between building attachments and making other improvements to their robots, programming them, and working on their projects.  






On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 11:59 PM, Frank Levine <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi all,
  I was wondering where the line is between 'kids do the work' vs 'starter robot' is?  I have seen several suggestions (both here and on the interwebs) that this/that robot is a great robot for rookies, etc.  While my team has been trying to make a decent robot from scratch, I have taken many of the suggestions that I have seen from the internet and made what I think is a decent driving base.  Is it appropriate to hand that base over to the rookies and let them go from there?  Will the judges frown on a coach doing some of the initial legwork to get a base started?  What's the difference between that and finding a starting base on-line?  Ideally I would love to see them make it from scratch, but today's building session has me thinking that this may be a bit of a stretch.

Thanks,
Frank Levine
"The Construction Mavericks"
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