Tossing frozen hot dogs, blowing bubbles, and making necklaces. See? Math can be fun.
At least on Pi Day, when 125 eighth graders at DeVeaux Middle School did such activities to practice using the mathematical symbol of pi.
"Pi is fun," 13-year-old Carlos Matamoros said. "Math is my favorite subject."
And you could tell Carlos was excited about it with all the work he put into Pi Day, appropriately held on March 14, because pi is most commonly abbreviated to 3.14.
He and two other boys designed the T-shirt everyone wore yesterday and he was one of four members of "The Flava of Pi" that performed a rap tune about the number set to the Eminem song "Lose Yourself."
"We gathered up some ideas and just tried to do our best," he said of the shirt that included a large pi symbol and math phrases.
He was later the most animated on stage during the song.
While math teacher Colleen Dezsi admitted with a laugh that most of the math games and activities were a bit nerdy, the whole idea was to get students excited about math and to learn about pi, which is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference.
In other words, you multiply a circle's diameter by pi to get the circumference.
"They're really getting hands-on experience," Ms. Dezsi said. "It's really important to have fun. That's how I learned most of what I know."
One of the quirkiest learning methods had to be the frozen weenie toss.
While it might not sound very educational, it does have merit. When you toss the frozen hot dog, you are the center of the circle and the toss represents the radius, Ms. Dezsi explained.
Through some math magic, multiplying the number of tosses by two and then dividing that product by how many hot dogs landed on stripes on the floor, you get pi or something close to 3.14. "It's weird how that works," Anthony Orosz, 14, said.
The hot-dog toss might have been overshadowed only by the hula hoop relay race, but that was intended more to get some of the students' energy out than to practice using pi.
To cap it off, for a $1 donation to benefit the Sparrow's Nest women's shelter, the students could throw a pie at a teacher at the end of the day.
Central Catholic High School took a different approach to Pi Day and sought to set a record for the longest chain of pi, which is an infinite number.
They apparently set a record of 66,000 digits - more than doubling the 31,415 on record at Pontiac Junior High in Pontiac, Ill., according to teachpi.org.
Students worked in groups of our or five to create loops of colored construction paper representing sections of pi, which were looped for an about three-mile chain. "It's kinda' cool, but I would be stressed if I had to put it all together," said Haley Long, 14, a ninth-grade student.
"I didn't even know there was a Pi Day," she said. "But I like that we get to get everyone involved in something like this."
Contact Meghan Gilbert at:
mgilbert@theblade.com
or 419-724-6134.
First Published March 15, 2008, 12:23 p.m.