Making Pi Buttons at the Pi Night at the High School – how many digits are on this button?

By Erica Voolich

Thursday, March 14 was Pi Day (3.14). What better excuse is there to have a celebration of math with middle schoolers than π?  On Monday before Pi Day, about 100 students, teachers, and high school Math Club members celebrated π at Somerville High School by eating pizza while spending an afternoon taking a math contest and then estimating, creating, answering questions, and ending with Table Talk pies for everyone.

The Somerville High School Math Club led by Michael Morgan organized the event. Instead of the usual math contest between Somerville’s middle schools’ math teams for the month of March, they invited the schools to come and have students take a math contest related to pi and circles written by the high schoolers and do some of the pi night activities the Somerville Math Fund has organized in the pre-pandemic past. While the eighth graders took the contest the seventh did the Pi activities and then the groups switched.

Drawing a cardioid with straight lines while wearing a Pi Shirt.

While enjoying pizza donated by the Bickoff family of the Commercial Cleaning Service, the students from the students from the Healey School, the East Somerville Community School, and the West Somerville Neighborhood school went around to a variety of pi math activities set up in the Lower Cafeteria at the High School.

These activities included: predicting bicycle wheel roll distance after one and a half revolutions, a guessing contest, π button design, π facts quiz, finding your birthday in π, drawing a cardioid or nephroid (curves from lines), and predicting circumferences in mm by feel of objects in mystery boxes.

Feeling inside the mystery box to estimate the circumference of the jar lids in millimeters.

Even though the Somerville Math Fund sponsored math night event was canceled by the pan-demic for three years, last year there were Somerville High School Math Club members who commented about remembering doing some of these events when they went over to either the Healey (2019) or the East Somerville (2018) for the Pi Family math night. So last year the Math Club organized the Pi Day celebration and repeated the event this year at the high school for the middle school students.

Scott Weaver (East), Wil Jacques (Healey) brought students and helped Erica Voolich (Somer-ville Mathematics Fund) organize the activities for the event. Also bringing students were Alyssa Mackey from West.

In addition, Scott Weaver at the East Somerville Community School organized a day of math/pi activities in all of his classes on Pi Day. All the East middle school students enjoyed Table Talk Pies to fuel their exploration of Pi and circles.

Table Talk Pies of Worcester generously supplied small pies for all who came that afternoon. Table Talk has generously supported this Somerville Math Fund event for twenty years (2 years off for Covid). When planning the first SMF π Night in 2003; the Math Fund called the Table Talk Pi Company and explained what π day was and Table Talk generously donated large pies for prizes and small pies for everyone. Twenty-one years later, Table Talk Pies is not only still donating to the Somerville Pi night celebration, but also to many more celebrations. This year Table Talk donated about 73,000 pies to schools and organizations celebrating Pi Day.

A big thank you to all the Math Club volunteers and donors who made this fun, educational event possible. It takes a community to celebrate π day!

The Somerville Mathematics Fund, was founded in 2000 with the mission to celebrate and encourage mathematics achievement in Somerville, MA. They will award renewable college mathematics scholarships in May and in January they awarded K-12 Teacher Grants. For more in-formation, to make a donation, or to volunteer, visit www.somervillemathematicsfund.org or math-fund@gmail.com or call 617-666-0666.