The story hack seems very hit-or-miss. For some students, the progression from the plum pudding model to the Bohr model to quantum mechanics is an engaging story that helps them understand the fundamentals of chemistry. Personally, these stories just made me tune out and wonder when they would get around to teaching me something useful.

That said, in scientific fields that are less well-developed, I think the historical experiments approach really adds to learning. It would be a lot harder to grok the psychology of authority without learning about the Milgram obedience study.