[discussDev]

I think you should let kids be creative and TRY to make useful things, but the quality of most things I made in school when I was creative and developing things was rather low quality in general because I needed to have all the learning experiences. So I don't think in general kids should be trying to build quality useful things but maybe we can just let them take a shot at everything to see how to do it instead.

[secabeen]

There is something pretty similar this called Project-Based Learning which tries to get there. Kids are tasked to find something that they're interested in, then the lessons that need to happen are modulated by their unique personal projects. It doesn't produce useful things, but it does produce things that they care about, which is nearly as good.