One way to engage students is to have them work on problems that they can relate to. An obvious example is to let them work out their course grade, which is often a weighted average of their scores on various components. An example is listed below:

I provide this table to my students and have them form groups of two or three and work on the following questions using Excel or Google Sheets:

1. What’s your final percentage?
   Hint: Try SUMPRODUCT()
2. Now assume that you haven’t got the final score yet. What’s your percentage so far?
3. What’s your percentage so far if you can drop the assignment with the lowest percentage score (and don’t have the final score yet)?

FYI, the answers are 86.4%, 85.3% and 86.0%. When missing the final score, the trick is to replace the weight of 20% for the final by zero and scale up the total result by 1.25, since the final is worth 20% and dividing by (1-20%) = 0.8 (or multiplying by 1.25) extends the maximum total score from 80% back to 100%.