Pi Day!

  Welcome to Pi Day, the day designated to celebrate the beauty of the most famous irrational number in the world.  The day celebrating a ratio of circumference to diameter.  The day people joke about with "Pie are not square, they are round!"  A day with its own organization.

Imagine, Pi has been calculated to the one trillionth digit!  A length that is so mind boggling that we just accept it rather than think about it.  I love Pi but my students fight me when using it.  They want to use 3.14 while I'm trying to have them use the Pi symbol because its more accurate.

Have you ever had a Pi scavenger hunt in your room?  Put up QR codes with information and facts on PI?  Then have them write down the trivia such as information on the RAF unit who has Pi as its symbol?

Did you know?
1.  NASA created a Stellar math challenge to show people how they use Pi in their work?  Image being able to show students a real life use of Pi other than for calculating the area of a circle or volume of a cone, sphere, or cylinder?

2.  There is all sorts of compositions out there based on the digits in Pi.  This activity explains how to compose a piece of music based on Pi so your more musical students could easily craft their own compositions on garage band or other app.

3.  What about an assortment of numerical puzzles involving Pi?  The New York Times Blog has a lovely list of puzzles your students can try.

4.  Check out Teach Pi for over 50 ideas and activities to help out on Pi Day.  Activities cover everything from crafts to events, projects, lessons, and songs.  The lessons cover everything from historical ways to calculate pi to figuring out the best price of a pizza or how much pizza each student gets based on the number of pizza's and students present.

5. To finish off the list of resources, the Exploratorium has a wonderful list of suggested activities and links to make celebrations even more fun.

If you want other ideas, just do a quick internet search for ideas.

Finally, Happy Birthday to Albert Einstein who was born on March 14th many years ago and who had a profound influence on the world.