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I'm a new professor and working at a computer science college. I'm going to be responsible for giving a one-hour lecture to motivate my students to study automatic groups.

I'm very experienced as a teacher and I think that I'm a really good speaker, but no idea about how to make these topics friendly and attractive for students who are just coming from high school.

I wonder how to find references and if you have any success experience on that to share with me.

Our ultimate goal is to make students interested in our research lab in which I'm a new member as well.

They're not going to take a course. But it is suppose to be something to make students to motivated enough to come to our lab, ask questions about the topic (in general and naive way), and maybe in the future become postgraduate students.

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    $\begingroup$ Please don't re-ask the same question with minor revisions (cs.stackexchange.com/q/167224/755). Instead, edit your original question with the "edit" button. $\endgroup$
    – D.W. ♦
    Commented Mar 22 at 21:59
  • $\begingroup$ I think I went back page and it left me on the create question “writing page”. I thought I was editing. I’m sorry. $\endgroup$
    – Felipe
    Commented Mar 22 at 23:16
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    $\begingroup$ Introduce finite state automata cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/14811/…. Introduce group theory youtu.be/mH0oCDa74tE. Contrast finitely generating with finite and infinite underlying sets. Explain how describing it with finite state automata is natural. $\endgroup$
    – Kenneth Kho
    Commented Mar 23 at 6:14

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There is no way this is at an appropriate level for students just graduating from high school. Save it for much more advanced students. It requires considerable mathematical sophistication -- and probably understanding of what automata are -- even to understand what an automatic group is and why one should care about.

Instead, know your audience. Describe something that it is at an appropriate level for them, where they can reasonably learn something new and inspiring, given the background they have.

You might check out CMU's course on Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science for some ideas: that is almost surely still too advanced (see its prereqs), but it gets closer.

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