In the coming weeks, I'm going to teach the second semester of a "first year experience" course. The course is largely comprised of first-year students who have declared a mathematics major, but have not made it beyond the level of calculus (at the U.S. university, which means the students have no background in proofs). The first semester of this course was largely about breadth -- simple discrete mathematics activities, guest speakers in several areas of mathematics, a bit of $\LaTeX$ and coding -- and the second semester is supposed to present a deeper dive into research mathematics.
One thing I'd like to work into this semester is a short unit on how to read a mathematics research article, because it is absolutely vital to the research process and requires a very different approach than reading a novel or a textbook. Has anyone done something like this before?
My thought was to find a short undergraduate article to give to the students to try to read in small groups. I don't expect them to understand the whole paper, but over the course of a week or two, I'd like them to experience the sort of non-linear fashion in which research papers are typically read and for them to try to explain some of the "big picture" aspects (what problem is the author trying to solve? why is it important? does the solution agree with intuition from a few simple examples? what is the proof strategy? etc). It would need to be fairly accessible and have minimal background requirements, but probably not be an expository paper. What I have in mind is something along the lines of de Gray's recent paper The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5, but I worry even that paper is a bit too deep for the level of students (who will have only about one week covering graph theory basics for a different project).
I've tagged this as both a reference request for an appropriate research article and as a soft/education question because I'm also curious to hear ideas and suggestions for implementation in the classroom (or arguments as to why I should scrap the idea).
Many thanks in advance.