[closed]

I agree that small exercises are good for teaching individual skills (e.g. a chess player practicing with only a few pieces on the board), but projects put the reason you are practicing into context. It's a motivator to practice. It shows smaller skills combined to produce some desired behavior.

I think a critical piece left out of the article is the role of emotional affect. Many people are learning because they want to produce a big, realistic set of behaviors (a project), so a good learning curriculum will motivate through a project and drill through small, independent exercises.

Another example, the article mentions Haskell being more useful for teaching cs concepts compared to node, or piano for teaching musical theory. While this might be true, we also need learn how motivated students will be to use these tools over others. At the end of the day, the usefulness of a tool for teaching concepts will be (its effectiveness when used)*(how motivated people are to use it).