[MITSardine]

To be fair, a lot of science doesn't follow the scientific method. I've yet to see an applied mathematician (to speak only of what I know) come up with a hypothesis, it's usually rather: here's how people solve this problem currently, this has this and that drawback, and our paper introduces a new method that solves bigger problems faster/new classes of problems.

The same could be said of theoretical work: here, we tightened up an inequality.

This is also research, not all of it is experimental!

[ModernMech]

Yeah I get it when giving projects to kids it's easier to be like "Here are the 5 sections you have to do" and then grade them on how well they did the 5 sections... but that's really limiting the spirit of the thing if the idea was to let the kids off the leash and see where they can take their minds.

[musicale]

I concur - research can include both scientific and engineering research.

I note MIT (like many universities) has a department of Electrical Engineering and Computer "Science".

[ModernMech]

It's interesting seeing the EECS and CS+CompENG programs splitting into two CompE and AI programs currently. This is happening in my department where we are standing up an AI major and we're all asking "Is the CS department the AI department now or what? Where do all the systems people go?"