[sorcerer-mar]

Pretty much all education research ever points to the act of actually applying knowledge, especially against variable cases, to be required to learn something.

There is no learning by consumption (unfortunately, given how we mostly attempt to "educate" our youth).

I didn't say they don't or can't provide an educational benefit.

[fullstackchris]

Some of the best software learning I ever had when I was starting out was following along with video courses and writing the code line by line along with the instructor... or does this not count as "consumption"?

[sorcerer-mar]

> I was... following along and writing the code line by line

That's application. Then presumably you started deviating a little bit from exactly what the instructor was doing. Then you deviated more and more.

If you had the instructor just writing the code for every new deviation you wanted to build and you just had to mash the "Accept Edit" button, you would not have learned very effectively.