Same here. Never really had the motivation in my mathematics courses at uni, too much theory. But with a concrete goal and visual feedback I was able to solve quite some problems.

Example, I didn't do well in my linear algebra course, but afterwards I made a (simple and slow) physics simulator with the very same concepts. Each thing I discovered, length between vectors, dot product, projection made a whooole lot of sense once I could actually draw the lines on a screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud8NirjyLAA