How do we teach students to relate engineering principles to real applications?

Traditionally, engineering degree courses have been fed with students having a background of `A´ level mathematics and physics and courses have been designed to build upon these analytical skills. This has led to a degree course tradition where the student has studied to achieve mastery of the mathematical analysis, essential to the modelling of engineering situations, but in his/her endeavours to seek an understanding of the mathematical manipulations may have lost sight of many of the underlying principles which are the basis of good engineering practice. There are many real life examples of where the engineer has failed to understand the basic principles and some of these are addressed by the author in this paper