The Big Breakfast - Delivering Critical Path Analysis

I love teaching critical path analysis and I recently did this starter activity that went down a storm. I can honestly say that without it, the students would have found the whole concept far more difficult.

At the start of the lesson, I told my students that on Saturday, I was going to cook my two girls a big breakfast. I basically read out the following:

On Saturday, I want to cook myself and my girls a big breakfast.I want to have some toast, scrambled eggs and some bacon.

It takes me 3 minutes to make the toast It takes 1 minute to break and whisk the eggs and then I need to put them in the microwave for a further 3 minutes. The grill takes 2 minutes to heat and bacon takes 4 minutes to cook under the grill. The breakfast takes me 1 minute to serve and a further 10 minutes to eat. Once I have eaten my breakfast I need to wash up which takes a further 2 minutes and then put the plates away which takes 2 minutes.

What is the quickest time I can do this in.

The results were amazing. I even had some students drawing mini diagrams to show the whole process. Of course, some students just added the times up.

I then got one of my students to come up and draw the whole process. We even discussed float time!

Once they understood how I could make my breakfast the rest was an absolute doddle.

How long did it take. Well, give or take a few seconds to put the grill on etc, the whole breakfast can be made in 21 minutes. Here’s how:

1 Put the grill on 2 Put the bread in the toaster 3 Whisking the eggs takes 1 minute 4 Put the eggs in the microwave – need to be in for 3 minutes 4 Once the grill is ready I put the bacon in – total time so far is two minutes 5 The toast is ready after 3 minutes and the eggs are ready after a total of 4 minutes 6 The bacon finishes after 6 minutes – 6 minutes so far 7 The breakfast takes 1 minute to serve – 7 minutes so far 10 – It takes 10 minutes to eat – 17 minutes so far 11 – Washing up and putting away takes 4 minutes – 21 minutes

Enjoy!