Pi day brings learning full circle
Pi Day, celebrating the irrational number whose digits never end yet starts out as 3.14159 and has had calculations carried out 10,000 numerals, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and was the subject of challenging game/arts projects at De Anza Magnet School on Tuesday.
Now in its fifth year, the focus is more on practical application rather the accompanying pie-eating or pie-throwing pranks of prior years. The objective is get students excited about math, noted Principal Richard Sanchez, who graciously took a pie in the face, to reward a student several years back. “We want to strengthen students’ number sense so they can establish a firm foundation in geometry,” said Sanchez. “When we do our exams month from now we’re certain we’ll see higher achievement than from previous years. It’s a great tradition and kids look forward to it.”
Pi Day began 28 years ago by San Francisco’s Exploratorium’s physicist Larry Shaw and has grown to include aficionados from a diverse array of backgrounds. Students in Jenny Martin’s fifth-grade class took precise measurements of various circular objects measured down to the millimeter.
Student Andres Villanueva aspires to be a civil engineer someday. “What I’m learning to day helps accelerate my academic ability,” he said. “You’ll never know when you’ll need these skills.” Added classmate Calypso Roncal, “Sometime in the future you’ll think, ‘Oh, maybe I can solve this problem at work by calculating pi.’”
At another class, the El Centro Elementary School District’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Department led students through an assortment of fun gaming/art projects to challenge their ability to apply pi calculations to determine circular or cylindrical volume that can later be extrapolated to architecture, construction or even astronomy.
In a card game similar to Go Fish, Augustin Vasquez, after school education and safety program tutor, had students discard or select cards according to a hand if a match was made to the next numeral in pi’s random order of digits.
“The objective was to have the fewest cards,” said Vasquez. “And in this way they’ll be encouraged to memorize the pi numerals.”
At another station to which students rotated, Peggy Ramirez, reading coach, had students connect circles they filled in with different colors that corresponded to pi numerals. “It’s an opportunity to celebrate the academic concept of pi and hopefully permanently etch memory of pi more forcefully into their memory,” she said.
In another concept, Susan Millan, educational technology resource teacher and the one who researched all the challenges, had students create a cityscape. “We’re connecting the value of pi in different art activities by making a pi skyline where each building on the bar graph represents a pi numeral,” she said.
Caroline Calderon, a sixth-grader, enjoyed all the pi challenges. “It was good and I remember when an eighth-grader memorized 100 numbers of pi and threw a pie in the face of the principal,” she recalled. “It was good because it encouraged students to remember the numbers of pi.”
STEM Department coordinator, Marco Arellano, noted the games helped students see a correlation between numbers and shapes. “So the challenges help to see the irrational values of pi,” he said.
“As they proceed through the exercise the concept of pi becomes more understandable through the game/arts projects.”