[solatic]

Right. My point is that I'm not convinced that hands-on projects and workshops, when force-fed to students within the context of a course taken at an educational institution, is inherently more effective than any other teaching method. As someone whose career is in software engineering, and who never had much interest in any of the sciences outside software engineering, I certainly remember having to do hands-on projects in required chemistry, biology, and physics courses... not that I remember much, if any, of it at all. The vast majority of true academic learning is self-directed, and the value of experience is in making mistakes that you are forced to bear the consequences of. "Consequences" do not really exist in a classroom (almost by definition), and grades (particularly in an era of grade inflation that renders them largely meaningless) do not count.