In the first part of this talk, I will introduce the moduli space of stable tropical curves and discuss its combinatorial structure and topology, illustrating with simple examples in low genus. In the problem session, you will compute one further example. And in the second half of the talk, I will explain some general results about the topology of moduli spaces of stable tropical curves, how these relate to the topology of the algebraic moduli spaces M_g and M_{g,n}, and then state some open problems and conjectures that you may find interesting to think about during the semester.