The best approach depends on whether your highest priority is to produce a lot of kayaks in a short time or have the students produce something that they will be particularly proud of and that will attract admiring comments from others.

I have been involved with school students building kayaks. Back in the late 70s and early 80's, I ran a project at my school building fibreglass kayaks. In fifteen weeks, we built thirty kayaks. If the mould was prepared and the gel coat applied the afternoon before, we could lay up the hull and deck in the eighty minutes of class time between recess and lunch, join the halves towards the end of lunch and remove the completed kayak from the mould at the end of the school day. Half a dozen students would come into school each Saturday morning and we completed another kayak before lunch.

Rules about using polyester resin and MEKP catalyst were a lot more lax back then. I'm fairly sure that the activity would not be possible with today's regulations.

The second project was supervising and advising a student who decided to design and build a strip built kayak as his final year technology project. Because I was convinced that some stages of the work did not lend themselves to completion within the constraints of the school timetable, he did almost all the work at home, often under my supervision. I had visions of him bevelling a strip and applying glue ready to fit it and then have the school bell indicate the end of the lesson before he had time to fix the strip securely in place on the forms.

That project took him over 250 hours to complete and won him extremely high marks as well as several prizes in woodwork shows and competitions. Part of the aim of the project was to demonstrate a range of woodworking skills and the ability to solve problems, so it was an impressive piece of work. In fact he has only paddled it a few times because while he is away at university, his mother has it displayed in the living room under a couple of spotlights. :)

It is possible, in fact it is often better to have two or even three people working on the same strip kayak, but it would take a long time to build up a fleet of kayaks if you build strippers. If they were built in less than 200 hours, they would probably be a bit rough. Sometimes during the process, there are times when no work can be done because you need to wait for glue to dry or epoxy to cure. So 200 hours does not translate into five 40 hour weeks. It was a year long project for my student.

You would need to have students with an exceptional level of commitment to complete strip built kayaks.

An advantage of strip built or S&G or SOF kayaks would be the ability to have individual designs to suit the size and ability of each student. However, the very old TK1 mould that I used produced a touring kayak that was a particularly versatile kayak.

So if you want to build a lot of kayaks in a hurry and you can get around the problems of handling the materials involved, then a fibreglass layup in a mould is the way to go.

If you have students who are prepared to spend about a year of their spare time, then strippers would produce kayaks that the students would be really proud of.

S&G or SOF may be a sensible compromise between those two extremes.