> I think what a lot of instructors fail at is they don't give students a working example of how something works. Sure you're not really going to learn, but what's the point of me having a half-assed assignment that isn't useful for me referencing a couple years down the road?
Like everything else in life it's a balancing act (or a chicken and egg problem). In a university/college context in particular it's not about being practical, it's about learning the (hopefully up-to-date) theory. There are concepts, classes of problems, and mental tools in computer science that are extremely valuable, but if you don't teach them explicitly you have everyone reinventing the wheel, and worse, doing it without a common vocabulary.
But as a student you can learn/memorise some concept (let's say recursion as an example), but you never really 'get it' until you've struggled with a real-world problem and realised that recursion solves it elegantly.
Sometimes the way we teach reminds me of hypnopaedia/sleep-teaching in Brave New World:
``` A small boy, asleep on his right side, the right arm stuck out, the right hand hanging limply over the edge of the bed. Through a round grating in the side of a box a voice speaks softly.
'The Nile is the longest river in Africa and the second in the length of all rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the length...'
At breakfast the next morning, 'Tommy,' someone says, 'do you know which is the longest river in Africa?' A shaking of the head. 'But don't you remember something that begins: 'The Nile is the...'
'The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa-and-the-second-in-length-of-all-the-rivers-of-the-globe...' The words come rushing out. 'Although-falling-short-of...'
'Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?'
The eyes are blank. 'I don't know.' ```
The takeaway (in the book at least) is that rote-learning like that has no value because its not conscious knowledge (but it's great for _moral_ lessons, like 'Ending is better than mending'). But I've lost count of the times where I've come up against a problem that niggles at the mind and realised I learned to solve it years ago at university, and it all falls into place. If nothing else, you know what to google for.
So I've come around full circle on how theory-heavy universities are (if we don't teach theory at university, where would we teach it?), but agree that there's a huge benefit to student experience by pairing it with exposure to full systems.
The older I get the more I find myself regretting (/resenting) how we've off-loaded so much job training to universities. You know how students can get exposed to real-world systems and learn real-world lessons? By having them recruited by real-world companies who invest in their development.
Seems like a CS degree would be most useful after you've been working with real-world code for ~5 years. Perhaps we need to split out most of the content of the current undergrad degrees into a CS equivalent of an MBA? Let the undergrads focus on practicality (ie, making the MIT missing semester the core experience), then come back in a few years to learn all the "correct terms" for the problems you've been coming across and learn the best-practice/optimal approaches.