Legos in college?

We're studying Process Selection and Facility Layout in Operations Management and yesterday we got to build with Legos! It really was a useful exercise that gave us hands-on practice with Cycle Times, Line Balancing, Precedence Diagrams, and, of course, teamwork. In teams of four, first we built the plane (pictured here) and took it apart a couple of times. Then we created a list of steps and put it into a precedence diagram so we knew what parts preceded which other parts. (This was a LOT harder than I thought!) We timed each step (on average it takes 3 seconds to pick up two Lego pieces and put them together). Prof gave us a cycle time of 25 seconds (this would be the station that took the longest time) and we assigned steps to each station based on the cycle time. This is called "balancing the line." We each took a station and sorted out the parts we each were responsible for. Although I insisted we needed to be sent to Las Vegas for a week of training, the prof wouldn't go for it and made us implement the line anyway. Dry run of the entire process showed that we hadn't quite balanced the line efficiently because two of the stations had too much idle time. Adjustments were made. Then each team was timed with winning team rewarded with leftover Christmas candy. We didn't win, but then we didn't lose, either. And we actually LEARNED something. Imagine that!