I'm assuming that you mean beyond car parks, traffic lights, pick & place machines, & elevators?
The best place for things to automate is the kitchen. The dishwasher has temperature settings, a sequence of cycles and so forth. Baking a cake (industrially) involves weighing &dumping of flour, metering in of ingredients, mixing, baking (PID temp control), recipe handling, variable sequences (differing #s of ingredients), and whatever other wrinkles you want to add.
The best training exercises involve (a) already knowing "how" it works, so the step isn't spoonfed (resulting in programs that didn't consider all the "what-ifs"; (b) expandable, so that the programmer doesn't make code that is hard to modify as requirements change. ((I know, that never happens in real life. Yeah right.))
Good luck.