CS Unplugged: Graph Colouring

Use The poor cartographer — Graph Colouring offline activity to explore how a computer deals with a ‘has to be’ rule. In this task, once a country is coloured in, any bordering country ‘has to be’ a different colour. Map colouring belongs to a general class of problems known as graph colouring. In computer science, a graph is an abstract representation of relationships. This task has links to computations and permutations in mathematics as well as rates that increase exponentially when applying the colouring problem to an increasing number of countries to be coloured on a map. Support your teaching and learning with video clips and other related resources.

Additional details

Year band(s) 5-6, 7-8, 9-10
Format Web page
Keywords Computation, Maps, Algorithms, Functionality, Usability, Problem solving
Organisation

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Copyright

Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0