Hats off, I think it takes some real dedication to stick with it.
> One of the things I found useful here was to get immediate practice once I knew just enough. I think this is one of the reasons project-based learning can be so powerful: you have a problem and research your way into it versus researching your way into it and then seeing what to apply.
This. Perhaps it varies from person to person, but this is also how I learn best. I want to start with a problem, struggle to solve it, and then learn how to actually solve it. That way the material immediately clicks and sticks with me longer. Why don't schools teach this way?
Bite sized “specs” calling for an answer to be solved in your new language. Each getting harder and dealing with important concepts to grok and hurdles to overcome.
Anecdata, however: project-based learning is powerful because getting something to work brings pleasure and failing to make it work brings pain. Being able to manage cycles of pain-pleasure from various stages of building and refactoring a project (hardware can also be refactored) is the basis of learning.
Schools don't teach project-based learning because schools are not interested in learning; they are interested in child-rearing, not letting them kill each other while the parents are at work, and offering employment for teachers and administrators. In schools, generally, learning is an epiphenomenon, not even an afterthought, simply an accidental side effect.
I don't think you can learn your way to the cutting edge of science in a lifetime with project-based learning. In my experience it just takes too much time.
I don’t think you are at the cutting edge if you are not comfortably getting your hands dirty with it, to the point that you can clearly see what is missing and how you can further improve it.
The issue is that the "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity have been picked, the high hanging fruits require at least some kind of ladder, nuts and bolts. Perhaps a theoretician should not wire themselves the electromagnets or write the ladder logic of the PLCs running the experiments, but going up and down the stack certainly helps one's understanding and appreciation of the larger scope.
You could be hard-pressed to find a more project-based learning project than the Large Hadron Collider/James Webb Space Telescope. No amount of Gedankenexperimenten could ever prepare you for the cutting-edge science&engineering at LHC/JWST/ITER/etc.
well, you probably learn more in the end if you aren't killed as a child by your peers or something happen to you while wandering around randomly all day while all adults at work
Some universities teach this way. In Europe, there are a few institutions that shifted to problem and project-based learning during the reforms of the 1960s.
A few notable cases are cited here: https://www.pblfuture.aau.dk/about. As far as I know, some American institutions use the same approach, e.g. Olin College.
IMHO, when done well, i.e. having an equally strong focus on theory, this leads to excellent learning outcomes.
However, at undergrad level, schools are reluctant to teach this way because it requires a lot of supervision.
It's indeed the best way to learn, but schools are charged with issuing grades to students and there are just too many problems with take-home projects (i.e. paying someone else to do it, etc.), and with group collaboration on such projects (one person doing 80% of the work, etc.), that it generally doesn't ever happen except in a few small-sized high-level undergrad or perhaps graduate courses, where the students are more motivated about learning the material then they are about gettting a good grade, or just passing the class.
Hands-on lab courses are something of an exception, as you simply have to do the project yourself in class, but these tend to be long classes (three hour sessions etc.) and again are limited to relatively small groups of students.
Building computer simulations in real-time of physics problems might be a way to do it, but the students would need to have good programming skills beforehand. Basically a physics hackathon using a standardized set of programming tools, that would be fun and educational.
It's impossible to learn the full breadth of material in a project-based way. You'd have huge gaps. Projects work for a sampling of the material and an motivation for the field, not everyone little piece of it.
> One of the things I found useful here was to get immediate practice once I knew just enough. I think this is one of the reasons project-based learning can be so powerful: you have a problem and research your way into it versus researching your way into it and then seeing what to apply.
This. Perhaps it varies from person to person, but this is also how I learn best. I want to start with a problem, struggle to solve it, and then learn how to actually solve it. That way the material immediately clicks and sticks with me longer. Why don't schools teach this way?