I teach introduction to programming for electrical engineering freshmen. There is no test; only weekly assignments, and I make it clear that they can get off the lesson plan and get full credit if they do something interesting. I try to encourage this, and I've never been disappointed by someone who takes me up on this offer.

But, yeah, a lot of what I do is de-conditioning. For one thing, people need to get out of the habit of waiting for all knowledge to be spoon-fed to them, because that's ridiculously inefficient. They need to learn to use the Google instead of sitting there staring off into space whenever they don't know something.

It's hard getting people to take a more active role in their own educations when they've been taught to be so damn passive, but I hear from a lot of graduating seniors that this was a very influential class for them, for precisely this reason.