Our Guest Post today comes from Howard Weiss, Professor of Operations Management at Temple University.
I use the following example in my OM class to discuss maximin and minimax in a context the students readily understand and to demonstrate several Excel functions to my student. (It is based on a piece in Interfaces in 1990). Prior to class I search for the daily high and low temperatures in the previous month and 
copy them into a spreadsheet. The results appear in columns A and B.
Ultimately, I will ask my students which day was the hottest in that month and which day was the coldest. First, though, the average highs and lows in column B need to be converted to individual numbers which will be placed in columns D and E. Identifying the High temperature from column B gives me the opportunity to
• Show students Excel’s LEFT function
• Show students that the results of the LEFT function are characters, not numbers
• Show students Excel’s VALUE function to convert the characters to numerical values.
Identifying the lows is slightly more complicated due to the degree sign on the right of the values in column B which precludes us from using Excel’s RIGHT function. This gives me the opportunity to show students Excel’s MID function to pick out characters 5 and 6 from the high/low string and convert it to a numerical value.
At this point, I ask the students which date was the hottest and which was the coldest. Several use Excel’s MAX and MIN functions to find the date with the highest high temperature and lowest low temperature. Some average the high temperature and low temperature for each day and base their answer on the highest and lowest of the averages.
I then suggest that perhaps the hottest day is the day with the highest low (maximin) temperature because it is most difficult to sleep on those nights (without AC) and that the coldest day is the one with the lowest high (minimax) temperature because it is the worst day to go swimming. I also show them how to use Conditional Formatting to identify the highest and lowest temperatures in columns D and E as shown to the left.
Finally, I have the students graph (not shown) the temperatures in these two columns. It gives me the opportunity to show that it can be valuable to modify the minimum and the major units on the y-axis to make it easier to find the highs and lows.
I really like using an exercise that gives me the opportunity to display a maximin and minimax explanation and to show the students some Excel functions and features.