In this optional lesson, students investigate how districts can be designed to influence the outcome of an election. Students are asked to gerrymander several districts: to divide them into sections to influence the final voting result in opposite ways. The mathematics here involves geometric properties of shapes on maps: area and connectedness, as well as some proportional reasoning.

Most of the activities use students’ skills from earlier units to reason abstractly and quantitatively about ratios and proportional relationships in the context of real-world problems (MP2). While some of the activities do not involve much computation, they all require serious thinking and decision making as students construct arguments and justify their plans (MP3).