Typically, I haven’t liked celebrating Pi Day. Interrupting learning just to eat pie or recite memorized digits just seems like a waste of everyone’s time. But these are the things that students and popular culture associate with Pi Day celebrations. Today is different, though. Today, I have the chance to weave learning into Pi Day.
It’s the last week of the term, so my 3D geometry students are working on final projects. I don’t feel too badly interrupting them to have them wonder a bit about the weirdness of pi. There are lots of ideas about this in James Tanton’s Weird Ways to Work with Pi, which I was happy to find. I was wondering what “pi” would look like for regular polygons like a triangle, or a square, or an octagon. Could we even talk about pi for polygons? And then I happened upon Tanton’s book. So today, I’m asking my geometry students to consider the question, “What does pi look like for regular polygons?”
I also have a class called “Social Decision Making.” It’s about voting methods, fair division, and a bit of game theory. So, in the only class where sharing a pie among 10 people is a relevant mathematical activity, we’re going to divide a pie, fairly, for all of us. Depending on the number of students in class, we might even just use parallel cuts, to make it interesting.
but my students are very inquisitive and quite resourceful. They wanted to figure these things out for themselves. And as luck would have it, our principal drives a Nissan Rogue. We also had Girl Scout cookie experts who were quick to point out that not all cookie boxes are created equally. We sent a group out to measure the cargo space while two other groups worked on the problems of cookie box sizes, cookie box weights, and Rogue payload capacity.
rawsonmath 