Group activities

Throughout the semester, you will frequently work in groups on problems and small projects.  Here are some of the longer group activities you will work on: 

• Two-candidate elections are not too bad

  • • Proof of May's Theorem.

• Choosing the best food on campus

  • • an instant runoff election to settle the question of the best food on campus once and for all.

• Ranked choice voting

  • • finding the winner of a ranked choice vote using all the methods we've seen.

• 2022 Alaska special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives

  • • a real election ehibiting many weird properties.

• The many strange ways of voting

  • • exploring the voting method in U.N. Security Council, Academy Awards, Eurovision, Olympics, ATP rankings, etc.

• Simulating the Electoral College

  • • Pizza or hamburger across the classrooms.

• Flipping the 2024 presidential election

  • • Figuring out the smallest number of votes Trump needed to flip to win the Electoral College.

• Playing around with apportionment

  • • deciding how the apportionment after the 2020 census would have turned out if a different method was used.

• Playing around with districting (coming soon)

  • • Exploring online districting tools.

• Are you good at gerrymandering?

  • • Try to districs a tiny state in three different ways.

• Gerrymandering measures

  • • examining partisan bias and compactness scores.