Ages: 7-8

Students will explore graph-coloring questions and tilings to lead up to an exploration of an open (unanswered) question in mathematics: the Chromatic Number of the Plane (aka The Hadwiger-Nelson Problem). But my real agenda here, as it is in just about every math circle, is to move children toward abstraction. We’ll start out by using manipulatives and then hopefully wean from those to explore the difference between objects and symbols and, more generally, the difference between things (the concrete) and ideas (the abstract).