At least in our case, we do a Fall warm-up scrimmage with local teams where students build simple FRC-class robots to play a game of our own design. In our case we typically have only 4-5 students building each "BunnyBot" during this time so students really get a lot of hand-on time with designing an fabrication. Since we'll have three robots, we'd need (eventually) three CRios, three OIs, etc.
Details on the "BunnyBot Scrimmage" are at
http://www.pnwfirst.org/html/bunnybots.html