Students celebrate Pi Day

Every March 14, math and science lovers around the world celebrate Pi Day, a commemoration of the mathematical sign pi. The date written numerically as 3/14 matches the first three digits of the never-ending number: 3.14. Pi Day was officially designated a holiday by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009, but was first celebrated in California in the year 1988.

Teachers embrace the holiday with fun math, science and art activities for their students. This year, Trout Creek Adventist School students celebrated the day with some fun competition and a little bit of dessert.

The students started their day with a journaling session as they tried to use as many pi words and 3.14 in their stories as they could think of. "There were lots of stories with 3.14 foot long 'pithons' and pirates eating 3.14 pineapples," said teacher Maurita Crew.

Students also had the chance to put their baking skills to the test and each baked an individual pie from scratch. Carrying on the pi theme for lunch, the school served vegetable pot pies and oranges cut into circles. After lunch, students completed a scavenger hunt by calculating the circumference of different circles.

"The students really had fun learning some funny math puns and pi day jokes, which we made into a video," Crew said. During PE, students did an "easy as pi" workout with activities lasting 3.14 minutes and drew cityscapes with the digits of pi during art class.

"The day ended with the pi digit challenge," Crew said. Since pi is a constant number and because of pi's infinite nature, memorizing the digits after the decimal point has always been a time-honored tradition and part of the celebration.

Jessica Evans memorized 62 digits after the decimal point, Shannen McFarland memorized 36 digits after the decimal point, Colby Evans and Dennis Bokov tied for third by both memorizing 26 digits after the decimal point.

"The students were shocked when I told them we needed to clean up and get ready to head home," Crew said. "We had such a fun and busy day."