[Flieger]

Well, I am in engineering which I think of as applied physics, which I guess is applied math...

We are always doing labs. There is a lecture and lab component to all the important ME classes from dynamics on up. We did labs in physics, too.

Cal Poly's motto is discedere faciendo ("learn by doing") so labs are a big part of our curriculum. So the example you gave sounds familiar. Although we always have a lecture portion that teaches us what others have found and what we should find based on equations and the theory. Then we go out and test it. Sometimes it is to see how well the correlation can be measured even with noisy signals and error, other times it is to see how hard it is to do that. But it gives you a better sense of what is really going on.