Next term I am leading a seminar for students, who will become teachers for elementary school i.e. for kids of age 6-10. The students in the seminar will have no mathematical background beyond the "Abitur". They are supposed to give a 45 minutes talk on a (not too difficult) mathematical topic, and they have to write an exposition of a few pages. My first ideas cover geometry of triangles, basics around Fibonacci sequences ect. Did somebody on MO teach a similar class already?
In brief: I would appreciate further suggestions for suitable topics very much!
Best Answer
I once taught a similar course. I had some success discussing mathematics and voting. Larry Bowen of Alabama has a webpage with some basic ideas and exercises:
http://www.ctl.ua.edu/math103/voting/mathemat.htm
Voting was also the topic for Mathematics Awareness Month April, 2008.
http://mathaware.org/mam/08/
We covered mathematics in music. The magical mathematics of music, by Jeffrey Rosenthal may be a good introduction for the students.
http://plus.maths.org/content/magical-mathematics-music
On this topic, I also recommend the work of Rachel Wells Hall (St. Joseph's). Here is a link to her homepage.
http://www.sju.edu/~rhall/research.htm
We discussed some probability. The students found the Monty Hall problem intriguing.
I hope this helps.