- This event has passed.
Acknowledge International Pi Day
March 14, 2019
Event Navigation
‘Pi Day’ is an opportunity to help students learn how to solve problems in the classroom and throughout the world around them. ‘Pi Day’ is a way to engage students in a fun and timely manner. Every teacher understands the constant challenge of making our subjects and lessons engaging for kids, and hence acknowledging a day provides a natural hook especially for a subject like Mathematics.
Ideas from students
The concept of Pi plays a significant role in Grade 8 Geometry and Algebra especially. After an in-depth classroom discussion which focused on the relation of ‘Pi’ to working of any circular-shaped object, we began to brainstorm on the methods of deriving value of ‘Pi’ and its application. Technology provided a great opportunity to engage the students and to explore how the area and volume of these various shapes are related to each other. To make it clear we started searching games and puzzles related to Pi and its applications. Then the students came up with two presentations which included an introductory video, real working models, a number of puzzles and games for the audience to play.
The whole event adopted a token system which allowed the visitors to play games in exchange for tokens. Every student participated in making the ‘Pi Day’ informative and engaging actively and in the process they understood that ‘Pi’ is not equal to either 3.1415…or 22/7 and it just approximated by various methods. The students explained various methods displayed in the presentations and applications of ‘Pi’ and had a remarkable time doing so.
Learning outcome
- Celebrating Pi day has brought us all closer to understanding the nature of our world and how inventors from centuries ago were able to understand the concept of Pi and how it works to create the circular and spherical things we use often in our life.
- Students also learnt how Pi was approximated and tried to understand how the values (22/7 or 3.14) are used in certain places where these are values required.
Ultimately the ‘Pi Day’ celebration helped to students to gain clarity on how ‘Pi’ is nothing but the ratio between circumference (in some cases it is the perimeter) of any circle and its diameter.
