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 engineering students — right?

A study published in 2020 had found engineering students preferred pure problems without context, but we weren’t sure — it turns out defining when a problem is and isn’t placed in context isn’t as easy as we thought. We wrote some questions that were either just ‘solve this equation’ or were dressed up with an engineering context, and asked students what they preferred and why.

We found pretty split preferences between contextual and non-contextual problems, and learned a lot about why different students prefer different sorts of problems and how they solve them (the quotes in the title give a flavour of this). The resulting article has just been published in Teaching Mathematics and its Applications. Check it out!

On the value of context in engineering mathematics problems: students’ perspectives by Patrick Johnson, Peter Rowlett and Alexandra Shukie.