All Hands-On Activities are Not Created Equal

As the STEAM lab facilitator, I'm always looking for hands-on, active learning challenges to present to the students.  I want these experiences to ignite the imagination and require probelm solving and collaborattion.  Have any of you seen Tinker Crate or Kiwi Crate?  Or Googled STEM/STEAM activities?  So many of them are written like a recipe: gather these materials, follow these steps, and you'll end up with.. a catapult, or whatever.  Yes, the students are active and perhaps even collaborating, but are they coming up with the design themselves? What problem are they trying to solve? How is the project relevant to their lives?   It's important when designing activities to remember that just because it's 'hands-on' doensn't make it valuable.  Are the students merely following a recipe to achieve a predetermined result, or are they truly experimenting and making connections to develop new knowledge of their own?  

The same is true for planning Professional Learning experiences.  I have been in more than a few workshops that claimed to be 'hands-on', and they were.  But the hands-on aspect was simply following along with the presenter, step-by-step.  That certainly has its place - Robin teaches the new teachers in our district about gradebook and attendance and there's really no other way to do that.  However, in my world of instructional tech, the opportunities to include constructivist elements in PL are boundless.  I've discovered that many people LIKE the sit-and-get model of PL, or even if they don't, it's a hard habit to break.  When I train teachers on a new program or app, I often go about it much like a STEAM lab challenge: here is the app, now create something with it!  When they say "But how do you do _________?", I point them to the online training videos.  I'm not there to hold their hand through the training videos, I'm there to make sure they can use that program effectively with their students, and maybe model for them a new instructional strategy as well ;)