Pi Day

It’s nearly Pi Day and this year I’m feeling quite excited about it.

The actual date is 3/14 (that’s 14th March for those of us on this side of the pond), which is inconveniently a Saturday, but what the heck, we’ll just have to celebrate a day early. Even if it does clash inconveniently with Red Nose Day.

What are we doing?

• Making ‘Wanted!’ posters. First search the web for information about pi – there’s a good page on Simple Wikipedia – then design a wanted poster. It has a picture of pi, then a description: Known to be irrational. Associates with circles. etc.
• Writing poems inspired by pi or circles.
• Trying my online Pi Challenge. It’s available to anyone, but it does require Flash. (If you have any problems using it, please let me know either via the comments box or via Twitter).  Actually a lot of the questions are about pies rather than pi, but I’ve interpreted the theme of pi quite liberally here! Some puzzles are easy, some are quite difficult. Some of the questions are sensible, some are just plain silly, but hopefully the students will enjoy it. I’ll be using this with students at my lunchtime ICT club. I’m also going to let some of my classes try this during lessons using the interactive whiteboard.
• Eating pie. Well, how could I resist? I saw a photo of a Pi Pie on Flickr and decided I had to try that for myself. On Thursday night I’ll be mass producing shortcrust pastry and chopping up Golden Delicious apples (which may be marketed as eating apples, but are fantastic when cooked) to make a lot of apple pi! The numbers are cut out with cookie cutters. I couldn’t find any in my local shops, but Amazon.co.uk stocked them, in fact these were cheap and dishwasherproof – perfect. The classes that complete the online Pi Trail will get to eat the pie.
• Creating a pi display in the maths department. There are some nice posters here that I’ll be including. That’s tonight’s task, I’ll post a picture once it’s done.
• Making pi chains. It’s also Science and Engineering Week, which includes a parents vs studenst STEM superstars event at my school. The maths challenge will be to make the longest pi chain. I’ll be providing strips cut from coloured copy paper, a key (red = 1, light blue = 2 etc) and a lot of digits of pi.

Do you celebrate Pi Day? What will you be doing?