Present a scenario similar to this, make sure it includes time, feature, and resource constraints:
It's week 5 of a 6 week build season and your team has decided to add an second arm to your hanging mechanism using 1/8" Aluminum tube stock. You 4 days to build and 4 days to test the new mechanism, you are out of 1/8" stock which takes 5 days to reorder, and your programmer is home sick with the flu.
Sounds impossible? What three variables can be fiddled with to ensure a successful outcome?
Time - Not enough time? Maybe you can work more hours in the day, perhaps overlap some of the fabrication/testing time.
Features - Blow off testing, don't build the arm, scale back the arm's requirements to fit available time/resources
Resources - Use a different material, borrow material rather than reorder, can someone else program?
Some of these questions are go/nogo type questions. If no one can program the arm then then the answer is "no arm". Other questions are compromise type, is it OK to make the arm out of wood for example.
This seed questions gets people to think about the three variables that can be manipulated to arrive at a conclusion and also the different types of questions that can be asked.
Then, if you can work in the Rock, Paper, Scissor, Lizard, Spock theory of the Design Decision Making Process, that would be awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iapcKVn7DdY
