“When numbers have meaning it makes it a lot easier for me” vs “I over think the given information and confuse myself”: do engineering students prefer maths questions in context?

In 1693, Christiaan Huygens was struggling to learn the new calculus developed by his former student Gottfried Leibniz. He wrote to Leibniz asking for “any important problems where they should be used, so that this give me desire to study them”. Ever since, ‘when will I ever use this?’ is a common refrain, especially among…