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At a time when higher education is rapidly digitalizing, two IÉSEG professors— Maud VANDENBROEKE at the Lille campus, and Tanja MLINAR at the Paris campus, are making the opposite bet: using toy cars to engage students in the learning process of the complex Theory of Constraints (TOC).

Bringing the abstract Theory of Constraints to life 

Every year, Maud VANDENBROEKE and Tanja MLINAR, both teach students a key but particularly complex concept in operations management: the Theory of Constraints (TOC). How do you optimize production when one machine is slower than the others? How do you identify that famous “bottleneck” that slows down the entire system?  

In this course, both professors were often faced with students’ disengagement, blank stares, and that frustrating feeling that the message isn’t getting through. “We asked ourselves how to make this course more engaging and make students ‘feel’ the slow machine problem”, explains Maud VANDENBROEKE. “Our ultimate question was: ‘how can we make sure they don’t fall asleep during the class on Theory of Constraints?’” laughs Maud. 

From frustration to innovation 

In a world where everything is going digital – online courses, computer simulations, virtual reality –Tanja and Maud are betting on the tangible. To address the challenges that students face when learning the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and optimization modeling, they designed the Competitive Car Production Game—an interactive, hands-on classroom activity. During the game, student teams take on the role of production managers, competing to achieve the highest profit by operating their own (toy) car manufacturing lines.

“We wanted something that you can touch and that could move… the idea of small plastic toy cars came to mind quite naturally because I have kids at home. It’s a bit old-fashioned and we go a bit against the stream of digitalization with this idea,” Maud admits. But the results exceeded all expectations. “At the moment we take out the cars of the bag, they’re suddenly super excited and very engaged in what’s coming next!” 

Tangibility almost becomes a form of pedagogical innovation. While Tanja and Maud also use digital games in their other courses, they’ve noticed that “there’s so much in the digital world now that students start liking again the simple tangible games again!” Maud observes.

The principle of the game is thus very simple. Students build teams, each constituting a toy car production line, and each team member manages a workstation: mold die, plastic injection molding, painting, assembly, packaging. On a board, squares represent processing times. A green car takes 2 hours at the first station, a blue one goes faster… and students must decide which cars to produce and in what order, physically moving the toy cars square by square, each round representing one hour of production.

The golden rule? There cannot be two cars producing at the same time on the workstation. And that’s when it becomes tangible: within minutes, the bottleneck becomes visible. Cars pile up in front of the slowest machine. Students can literally count the inventory accumulating, see the production flow choking, and feel the frustration of wasted capacity.

“We wanted to make it tangible because students really see the pieces in front of the machine and understand better this bottleneck problem. They can identify which machine is the slowest and then decide which cars to produce next,” Tanja explains.  

Competition and collaboration to succeed 

The game blends competition and collaboration: the team with the highest profits wins, while each group works as an assembly line where every member has a specific role. Teams first discuss and plan their production strategy together before competing. The pedagogical twist comes at the end: “we reveal that even the winning team didn’t achieve maximum profit. That’s when we take the opportunity to introduce the theory of constraints, showing students how the system can be optimized.” The abstract concept suddenly becomes concrete for students, and the need for optimization is no longer a constraint imposed by the professor, but a lived reality. 

The game’s success doesn’t stop there. In the extended version, teams compete in auctions for extra capacity, often paying through the nose just to keep others from getting it, which leads to funny bidding wars and makes the learning process even more exciting. Maud and Tanja are already envisioning new extensions: integrating marketing aspects (setting prices to attract customers), sourcing environmentally friendly materials, managing inventory that degrades over time, or even production location decisions. 

“We’re thinking of creating a real business game out of this,” Maud enthuses. “Innovation doesn’t always require big budgets or cutting-edge technology. Sometimes, all you need is a bag of toy cars, a board, and the desire to make students feel rather than just explain.”