These interactive web-based activities introduce students to mathematical approaches in understanding electoral redistricting. Through a series of examples on small grids, students will learn about how the space of possible districting plans can be represented mathematically and how quickly the number of possible valid plans grows. Students will also learn how outlier analysis can be used to detect gerrymandering, by exploring how adjusting the voter distribution affects the space of outcomes and by building plans and comparing their properties to the distribution of other plans. The activity concludes with introducing Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling as a method for drawing conclusions about the space of plans when there are too many to list. This activity might be applicable to a statistics course, or any class that touches on combinatorics or graphs/networks.
