What is active learning, and when does it happen? Whenever experiences stimulate mental activities that lead to meaningful learning, this is active learning. Mentally active learning of ideas-and-skills can occur in a wide variety of thought-stimulating activities, ranging from direct learning (of ideas that are explained in a web-page, book, lecture, video, tv or radio show,...) to learning by discovery (as in doing an experiment and then trying to discover your own explanations for what has been observed), or in design projects and other kinds of problem solving where the learning cannot be defined as either direct or discovery. All of these thought-stimulating activities can produce active learning, because educationally productive mental activity can occur — with or without physical activity in which you “do” something — during a wide variety of mentally-active experiences.