Livre d'Or

Ooh, really interesting to hear about how you learn. (The more so since none of what I'm talking about would be anything like as doable without PuTTY.)

Definitely makes sense about real problems, even if they are frivolous problems. As for the issues that creates with designing courses, only imagine what happens when the "real problems" you'd ideally like to get your students to solve are medical problems, not just coding problems. Even apart from the ethical issues it's a major obstacle to giving students real-world experience when you don't know in advance how difficult it is likely to be to manage a particular condition or which knowledge and skills are relevant.