Real life development is a lot closer to "McGiver" than the "show case" labs featured in advertisements and company tours.

Yes, indeed. I can play with Lego all day and get paid for it. ;-) No, really:

We like to use Lego for quick test setups. Take a large Lego board, click a few bricks onto the board, fit a PCB, sensor, actuator, laser pointer, prototype board, eval board between the bricks. Add the next bricks, and parts. Add a few more bricks to prevent that mess from falling apart. Add wires, tubes, whatever is needed. Pad with paper or adhesive rubber feet. That works surprisingly well.

Larger, heavy Lego parts also work well as paperweights to temporily fix pieces of printed paper with fake screenshots on a large piece packaging paper while discussing interaction between the parts. Old Lego rails work incredible well to mark borders between the parts. We used exactly that on a ping-pong table to discuss how our software should work with our client. Different colors could be used for grouping, and the client asked for the meaning of the colors, but we did not use that. Colors were meaningless in that discussion. All of us, including the client, moved paper and Lego parts around until we found out how the client wanted the software to behave. We taped the paper pieces to the packing paper, replaced Lego borders with marker lines, and draw some notes onto the packing paper. That was our inofficial main document for the user interface development. We simply taped it to a long wall and looked at it whenever we needed details or had to discuss implementation variants.

We later reused that trick to discuss interaction between parts of the software, without the client; and once again for a larger rework of the software internals.

Alexander