Applying my educational background (Master in Mathematics, German Literature, Ph.D. in Applied Physics) and my professional experience gives various possibilities to do cross curricular teaching. Our school hosts a special type of secondary school with main emphasis on technology and engineering – all students use laptops in well equipped classrooms. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is called MINT (Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften, Technologie). Of course both acronyms do not list all the fields involved like physics, astronomy, chemistry, computer science, information technology, mathematical sciences, life sciences, anthropology, economics, psychology and sociology (the expanded definition of STEM of NSF).
Maths being the last keyword in STEM it is the basic language for all others and it uses thinking which is useful in every discipline. E.g. abstraction is a principle found everywhere. Computer Science e.g. programming can be seen as part of it with the same properties – used in every other area.
Mathematics teaching is aided by using software, the most important being Geogebra. Using the newest versions with all the exciting possibilities given by CAS-View allows working much like in bigger applications like Mathematica – the results can be published as live and editable applications in Mahara.
A very important consequence of this point of view is using all the different areas together e.g. programming is used in mathematics to do Monte-Carlo-Simulations.
