This is a good technique for the engineering/physics side of the coin. For the more academic and "pure" math it might not be such a great goal. That said there'

This is a good technique for the engineering/physics side of the coin. For the more academic and "pure" math it might not be such a great goal. That said there's enough nice libraries and IDEs that one could use videos games to explore other mathematical contexts. But I don't get the impression that OP is a game programming enthusiast. Also that's a lot of overhead.