Every course I took in the CS, applied math, or EE departments required us to, you know, actually do something. In my POSIX programming class, we wrote lots of programs (malloc, web proxies, and so on). In my graphics class, we wrote renderers (while paper tests covered the algebra of geometry). In my PDE classes, we wrote simulation code in Matlab and saw it run on wave and heat equations.
In mech, though, scarcely any classes had an experimental component. Fluids? Nope. Heat transfer? Negative, barring a baking orb lab and a Reynold's number lab. Machine design? Hah, fat chance--a 25 page report on a fucking bolt was the capstone assignment (alternately, a failure analysis on a gear tooth that chipped in a transmission). Control systems? A few tedious labs more suited to padding out a grad student's paper on teaching engineering than actually, you know, teaching us anything.
The height of this nonsense was a mandatory lab on power generation--one in which we finally got to run a steam powerplant! Except we didn't, and were given the results to run our analysis on instead. Sitting in the campus pub afterwards and grousing into my beer, a facilities guy from the central plant expressed surprise--they'd specifically made sure to have steam run out to make that lab happen. The lab was cancelled because that steam wasn't available, nominally--more likely, the student running it was looking for a way out.
The only good labs we had were an industrial processes lab (machining, welding, and so on), and a strength of materials lab (tension, torsion, and whatnot).
I guarantee that at the end of four years any of our CS or EE kids were substantially better coders--I cannot claim the same for the mechanical engineers I graduated with.
Our final design project was our one true chance to show that we could actually build something, and for many teams that too resulted in failure.
EDIT:
The problem with so much of this is that there are perfectly good ways these things could be taught. Machine design could have you, you know, actually manufacture some cams or build gearboxes. Heat transfer could have you build heat sinks, manage fluid flows, or create exchangers. Control systems could have you build robots or invert pendulums or do any other damn fool cool thing that requires signal transforms.
It's just such a goddamn disappoint.