Pi Day is past (I can't keep up)

Various "Pi Day" activities investigated by June Kronholz for the Wall Street Journal:

• At LaSalle Middle School, St. Louis, this ode was sung to the tune of "Oh Christmas Tree":

  Oh number pi, oh number pi,
  Your digits are unending.
  Oh number pi, oh number pi
  No pattern are you sending.
  You're three point one four one five nine
  And even more if we had time.

  
  
• Field School in Washington D.C., held a pie-eating contest -- and featured chicken pot pie for lunch.
  
  
• Hayes High School in Birmingham, Ala., held a math competition. The prizes: chocolate and marshmallow MoonPies.
  
  
• Hazelwood's middle school had a digit-reciting contest. Crystal Naes, a seventh grader, won by reciting the first 205 digits to the right of pi's decimal point. She had memorized about 370 digits, she says, but "the last numbers were sort of floating out there." Her prize: a chocolate pie.
  
  
• At Birmingham's Hayes High, kids are finding the mean, median and mode of the first 50 digits of pi. The school has given out "hundreds and hundreds" of MoonPies in prizes.

June asks:

So what's to be done to get kids excited about, say, chemistry? Well, that would be Mole Day, which lauds the mole, a measuring unit tied to Avogadro's Number. Avogadro's number is 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd power. Be prepared to celebrate on Oct. 23, between 6:02 a.m. and 6:02 p.m.

Technorati Tags: Math, Education, Pi, Pie