5 Fun Activities to Celebrate Pi-Day with Your Kids.
Yay!! Today is Pi day.
Do you know why mathematicians (and fellow nerds) go crazy on March 14 every year? How about you grab a slice of your favorite food pie (apple, cherry, pecan, chocolate...pizza?) and let’s dive in to the details on this math symbol.
Pi, or Archimedes’ constant, is the math symbol which represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is an irrational number which means that it cannot be expressed as a fraction and its decimal representation NEVER ENDS.
Pi begins as 3.14159....and goes on and on to infinity and beyond! We celebrate Pi day every year on 14th March or 3/14. Now if you want to get really crazy, celebrate it at 1:59pm.
While computers are used to calculate the digits of Pi, some humans find it fun to try and memorize as many digits as they can. Here are the world rankings of those Pi-masters. Using the company's cloud computing service, Google employee Emma Haruka Iwao, has broken the world record by calculating Pi to 31.4 trillion digits!! It took 25 virtual machines 121 days to complete the work.
It would take us 332,064 years just to say the 31.4 trillion number.
(This video is 3.14 mins long. Well played Google. Well played)
Aside from all the fun we have with Pi, it is a very useful and necessary constant in many ways.
Pi has allowed important calculations to happen in order to solve so many real world issues. For instance, if you need to calculate the amount of water in a tank, you need to use Pi to calculate that volume. Pi is used in almost all forms of engineering; from finding out volume of curved objects, or calculating how much fuel an airplane will require on a trip to even making our global positioning systems (GPS) work.
Doesn't this super useful number deserve to be celebrated ?
There are lots of fun activities you can do to celebrate this awesome math constant. So check these out and give some love to math’s little cutie, Pi.
1. My Pi Day
This is a fantastic site that finds your birthdate within the first 10,000,000 digits of Pi. It’s super crazy that they came up with this, but it’s so cool to know that you have a special connection to Pi.
Even NASA has gotten in on the action and listed some great activities to celebrate Pi. Take their “Pi in the Sky” math challenges to calculate Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, find the size of a planet outside our solar system, or help identify a crater on Mars. Pi is so useful!
If you want to understand more about what it means to divide a circle’s circumference by its diameter, the "cutting pi" activity on this page illustrates the concept perfectly. There’s an activity that explains how to calculate pi and a fun toothpick tossing experiment that demonstrates a surprisingly fun method of calculating this irrational number.
The activity is an annual favorite of Pi-lovers everywhere! Draw/paint your own Pi skyline using graph paper and the digits of Pi. Math and art come together to create a stunning masterpiece!
Another great all time favorite ‘math meets art” activity is making Pi-day bracelets! Assign a color to a digit and start adding them in the order they appear in Pi. It’s a fun and fashionable way to show off your love for Pi.
We hope these activities give you a real appreciation for a seemingly simple Greek symbol which is essential for so many important discoveries and calculations.
Celebrate Pi-day with a FREE DOWNLOAD of our story "Slice of Pi" that appeared in the very FIRST issue of Smore magazine (Aug 2017).
So sit back with a slice of pie and dig into this story with your kids. What a perfect way to teach children to appreciate and enjoy math.
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