Take a bunch of middle school kids, their teachers, parents and some volunteers add a good bit of math, some food, and what do you get? A π Night Celebration!
On Thursday night, 3.14, over three hundred students, parents, teachers, and volunteers celebrated π by eating pizza for dinner, then spending an evening estimating, creating, collecting data, answering questions, and ended with pies for everyone and π pencils for the students.
After enjoying pizza donated by the Bickoff family, the students from Kennedy, Healey, West Somerville and Argenziano schools went around to a wide variety of math activities set up in the gym and cafeteria. These activities included: bicycle wheel roll, guessing contest, tooth pick drop (Buffon Needle problem), drawing a circle the size of a CD, mystery boxes, π button design, π facts quiz, birthday in π, circle in square vs square in circle, drawing cardiod or nephroid, drawing concentric circles by folding, drawing circles by tangents, drawing circle by right angles, reciting digits of π, predicting how high of a pour, predicting circumferences and radii, graphing circumference vs diameter.
The event was planned by Wil Jacques (Healey), Ellen McPherson (West Somerville Neighborhood School), Jack O’Keefe (all middle schools), Kaitlin Souza (Kennedy), Erica Voolich (Somerville Mathematics Fund) and Scott Weaver (West Somerville Neighborhood School). Table Talk Pies of Worcester generously supplied small pies for all who came that night and large pies for winners of events. Table Talk has generously supported this Somerville Math Fund event for ten years. Star Market/Shaws (Beacon Street) generously donated most of the juice.
The wonderful volunteers from Somerville High School, the Kennedy School PTA, the community and teachers from Kennedy, West Somerville Neighborhood School, Healey School and Argenziano School helped to make the evening possible.
This Pi Night celebration was sponsored by Somerville Mathematics Fund, an affiliate of the national scholarship organization Dollars for Scholars. They were founded in 2000 with the mission to celebrate and encourage mathematics achievement in Somerville MA. In April they will be looking for applications for college mathematics scholarships. For more information, www.somervillemathematicsfund.org or mathfund@gmail.com.
© 2013 Somerville Mathematics Fund, Erica Dakin Voolich
The link to this post is http://somervillemathematics.blogspot.com/2013/03/starting-with-pizza-ending-with-pie-and.html
