The Man Who Counted: a collection of integrated adventures

Issues of disconnect and isolation from other disciplines seem to plague numerous subjects taught in high schools today. Although they share common roots, mathematics, natural sciences and humanities appeared to have developed rich, but separated curricula with only occasionally emphasized and seemingly weak connections between their respective contents. The absence of truly meaningful context that allows students to build connections to material they are learning often results in procedural, factual and regrettably short-term knowledge. One approach to repair the disarray within our educational structure may be by developing integrated projects that span not only across different facets of one particular subject, but across multiple disciplines as well. Most educational reforms have been strongly supporting the idea of integration of curricula, emphasizing that the noticeable lack of connections between the subjects is affecting not only mathematics, but also language arts, social studies and various other disciplines. The primary purpose of this article is to describe an integrated project that successfully merged the teaching standards of mathematics, social studies and language arts, while utilizing technology as the means to an innovative learning medium for high school students. The focus of the article is the development process of an integrated project, more specifically the obstacles that needed to be overcome for its successful completion. Through this particular example of a mathematics-based integrated project, we demonstrate how content standards of various disciplines can be effectively combined to produce a meaningful teaching and learning context. It is our hope that the presented development process can be generalized and applied in various collaborative teaching efforts.