It's just an example of a teacher engaging their students in a subject by not only teaching to the test.
Here's another one. I had a maths teacher who engaged his students about probability theory through learning about games of chance. We spent some lessons figuring out what advantage we could get in various card games. He also spent some lessons on just "cool" ideas like infinity, zeno's paradoxes and other mind blowing concepts. None of which were on the exam syllabus.
As an aside, history is very much not about facts. It's more about interpretation of incomplete data from many different sources, not all of which are reliable. My Dad said it's more like being a detective (he was a professor of history).
Here's another one. I had a maths teacher who engaged his students about probability theory through learning about games of chance. We spent some lessons figuring out what advantage we could get in various card games. He also spent some lessons on just "cool" ideas like infinity, zeno's paradoxes and other mind blowing concepts. None of which were on the exam syllabus.
As an aside, history is very much not about facts. It's more about interpretation of incomplete data from many different sources, not all of which are reliable. My Dad said it's more like being a detective (he was a professor of history).