As a at Juneau Douglas High School (Alaska) teacher, I linked mathematics to a modern day art form using a group-based program called "Phoenix".  The link gave students the potential either to create a unique colorful image or to learn programming skills. As an additional feature, it captured the attention of less attentive students.

Content leading to the development of each student's fractal included a modulus operator, base conversion, binary code, logical operators, group theory, the concept of a mapping, matrix addition and multiplication, eigenvalues, probability, and writing C++ source code.  Though this sounds impossible, it was possible to get all this into student projects on fractals and to have them produce very colorful results.