Math in Our Democracy: Detecting and Preventing Gerrymandering

I taught this "Jan term" course in January 2020, 2021, and 2022.  I loved teaching this course, and the students seemed to get a lot out of it.  I have many resources that I can share, and I also used many resources from the MGGG teacher trainings that happened in 2018.  Please contact me directly if you'd like any resources.  Here is the outline of the course:

Week 1:

1. Intro: What is redistricting?  When does it happen?  How does it happen?  What is at stake?  Playing around with shapes.

2.  Partisan Gerrymandering, shape metrics

3. Finishing up Shapes

4. Seats/Votes Curve and Partisan Bias

Week 2:

1. Mean-median Difference

2. VRA and Racial Gerrymandering, the Efficiency Gap

3. More Efficiency Gap, more Racial Gerrymandering

4. Intro to GEO metric, more Racial Gerrymandering

Week 3: 

1. More GEO metric

2. Outlier Analysis

3. Special visitor + Outlier Analysis discussion

4. Comission discussion and Ecological Inference

Week 4:

1. More Ecological Inference

2. Special visitor + EI

3. Working on Projects

4. Project presentations