This term, students investigated the concept of gerrymandering and how it impacts our governmental system. Students grappled with the challenges of how to design fair, equitable, and mathematically sound methods for apportioning representatives by dividing the population into districts. They also experimented with different ways to identify if a current map or district is extremely gerrymandered or unfair. Using a NetLogo program, students were able to create many colorful grids to represent a state divided into different districts. Using the numbers generated in these maps, they established algorithms for identifying if, or how much, a map is gerrymandered. Click on the individual documents to see their full algorithm and examples.
