Pi Day Activities


Numbers, Treasure Hunts, and Tennis Balls!

On March 14 at 1:59pm, folks from all over the world celebrate “Pi Day” with games, activities, and pie-eating contests. I've put together a downloadable packet that you can use to set up your home or classroom with fun, interactive activities that really shows the magic of pi.

Pi (p) is a number slightly greater than 3 that shows up when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, no matter what size the circle is.

It also shows up in other shapes like spheres, ellipses, cylinders, and cones as well as unusual places like summation series, number theory, probability, bell curves, and the Fibonacci series.

Pi is an irrational number, which means that its digits never end and that it doesn’t contain repeating sequences of any length. Mathematicians can’t say with absolute certainty that pi contains every possible finite number sequence—but they strongly suspect that this is the case.

Here's what you do:

After you enter in your email, you'll get a link to the PDF workbook packet.

Print out the materials in this packet . There are 12 stations, each with a specific hands-on activity about pi. Each station also has a couple of materials you will need to have along with the printed instructions, so gather these together also. (There's a master list on the second page of the download.)

Be sure print out a couple pages of "pi tickets" on page 19. The students get one "pi ticket" for each answer correct on the answer sheet they turn in.

Print out the answer sheet (pages 20-21, printed back-to-back) and give this answer sheet to the students (note that there’s a data table required for station 3 which I’ve already printed on Page 21 for you).