[crdoconnor]

>The goal of university is not to prepare you as best as possible for working life, but to teach academic thinking.

Because academics don't work on projects? C'mon.

Except for a few things (like math) I wanted a lot to be taught in a project based fashion at university. There was a lot of CS stuff that we learned where the professors were super unclear about why it was important or when the correct time to apply the knowledge was. That not only made the teaching less useful it seriously sapped my motivation.

Years later I was surprised a lot by the applicability (or not) of some of the knowledge taught to us and I think probably the lecturers could probably have guessed that I would run in to these situations - they just didn't put much (if any) emphasis on bringing it up.

Now I'm teaching (as an amateur and not in a university, but still), I'm teaching in a project based fashion because it's how I wanted to be taught.

I do this partly because I'm trying to present every topic as a problem first in a context that seems realistic. I feel like getting students to recognize and 'feel' the problem themselves before teaching them the solution helps with their motivation and the applicability of that knowledge - wherever they decide to use it.