Shaping Youth BETA BLOG

“Now there is an ancient Greek letter, And I think no other is better. It isn’t too tall, It might look very small, But its digits, they go on forever.”

This Pi Day limerick was brought to you by “Scott,” a young student celebrating 3.14 today in honor of the mathematical pi.

Founded as an international “geek” holiday declared twenty years ago by physicist Larry Shaw at our own S.F. Exploratorium, Pi Day is now a fun fest of activities, programs, parades and puns to uphold the history and value of pi as a constant in the equation of life.

My daughter has brought an apple pie to her middle school the last couple of years, so I’m wondering what all they’re going to be doing with it, as the web is brimming with juicy activities that are ‘sweet.’ (hey, I warned you there would be word play)

From Second Life’s virtual world celebration to wiki reports that MIT sends out their acceptance letters to students on Pi Day, it’s nice to see math get some media coverage besides here, here, and here in Shaping Youth’s interview with ‘mathlete’ Danica McKellar, of “Math Doesn’t Suck.”

My Pi Day favorites? For younger kids: downloadable pizza pi posters and creating Pi-Ku, for haiku poets, for older kids, Google engineer Eve Andersson’s Pi Land (visual credit too) which shows the digits via computer calculations to many millions of decimal places. (sure to get an ‘awesome’ response)

I also love Teach Pi’s math media doing a music rap take off on Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself (in the digits)’ to create a hip-hop math mix in YouTube style! For the best round-up of Pi Day links all in one spot, (including content blurbs for what’s on each site) SurfNetKids has plenty more. Give us the 411 on the 3.14 celebrations in your region for Pi Day…kids? profs? teens?

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