A tail for Pi...

Sometime back, there was a discussion on one of the math e-mail groups I'm a part of, regarding the number Pi. This discussion brought back memories of what we did with Pi when I was a teacher at the Valley School (KFI) in Bangalore some 15 years ago. As part of preparations for our science day, we prepared a 'Pi tail'. I had with me a computer generated value of Pi up to 2500 decimal places. The idea was to write out all these decimal places in the form of a tail. So we made strips from newspapers, and using marker pens, wrote out the entire thing! Of course, children came to the math room whenever they were free (many a times, they even bunked classes to make the pi tail!).

On science day, we took out this long tail (which incidentally measured all of 850 feet long) and, starting from the notice board opposite the library, we literally bound the school complex with this tail! It went inside some classrooms, the toilets, and whatever was left of it, children climbed the tree at the jungle gym and let it hang from there! Everyone was curious, particularly the younger children. They were seen running along the length of this number tail. When a few children I taught came up to me and said 'Now we understand why one calls Pi an irrational number...it seems to go on and on without any end!' I knew the Pi tail had made a difference. So much for 'experiential learning'!

Try this out and have fun with your children!

Shesh
July 2008