A common gripe from young students when learning math is "I'm never going to use this!"

With programming, it's much easier to motivate the subject matter - students want to learn the math so they can improve their projects.

Similarly, I found linear algebra and linear programming much more interesting when I was studying economics, and classical physics much more fun when writing little javascript animations.

So maybe applied math is a better approach at the intro levels. I'm just not sure how we get there from existing math-centric teachers and curricula.