How to teach gerrymandering and its many subtle, hard problems by Cory Doctorow.
From the post:
Ben Kraft teaches a unit on gerrymandering — rigging electoral districts to ensure that one party always wins — to high school kids in his open MIT Educational Studies Program course. As he describes the problem and his teaching methodology, I learned that district-boundaries have a lot more subtlety and complexity than I’d imagined at first, and that there are some really chewy math and computer science problems lurking in there.
Kraft’s pedagogy is lively and timely and extremely relevant. It builds from a quick set of theoretical exercises and then straight into contemporary, real live issues that matter to every person in every democracy in the world. This would be a great unit to adapt for any high school civics course — you could probably teach it in middle school, too.
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Certainly timely considering that congressional elections are ahead (in the United States) in 2016.
Also a reminder that in real life situations, mathematics, algorithms, computers, etc., are never neutral.
The choices you make determine who will serve and who will eat.
It was ever thus and those who pretend otherwise are trying to hide their hand on the scale.