This is aimed to motivate people to learn how to create their own functions. (The background I had in mind was Biology Masters students learning R, but it should be more generally applicable.)
Demotivation:
I don’t tend to get demotivated, so it’s hard to think of a relevant example. If I think a general topic is interesting I’ll try to understand how it works and find out all I can about it. The best example I can think of was during undergrad, where there was one particular course (on ocean basin formation) which consisted of a lot of memorising facts and very little working things out. Sometimes I’m happy to learn facts, but I think in this case I didn’t see why I would want to know about basin formation as I didn’t find it particularly interesting. Also the lecturing wasn’t very engaging; from memory it was mostly equations and few examples of how to use them or why we would want to use them.
I think with more of a focus on problem solving, especially in the practicals afterwards, if not in the lectures themselves then I probably would have found the course more interesting.