I’ve recently been teaching my 13 year old daughter to solder and this was her first real project. She did as good of a job as a first timer could.
The device does not power up and no LEDs turn on. I’ve metered the power coming in and it is a solid 12VDC. The only thing that seems remarkable to me is VR2 gets very hot to the touch after only a few seconds of power. Could this single component be bad?
Please post a picture of the kit 
I see that you have mounted IC2 the wrong way
Oh, I did put it in backwards! I’ll reverse it now. I hope I haven’t done permanent damage to it!
That was it! Turned out I had not only one, but BOTH IC’s reversed. Didn’t even need to desolder the sockets. Just turned the chips around and it works! Thank you!