RAFT Prepares for Pi Day Event on March 5th
San Jose, CA (PRWEB) March 03, 2016 -- Resource Area for Teaching (RAFT) the San Jose-based nonprofit organization committed to hands-on learning, will host a Pi Day event on March 5th in honor of International Pi Day on March 14th. The March 5th event will be held from 1:30pm – 3:30pm and will feature engaging activities for teachers to include in their classroom’s Pi Day celebrations on March 15th. RAFT’s Mathematics Master Teacher, Jeanne Lazzarini will host the event and show educators how to teach their students about the importance of Pi and how it relates to real life.
“For example,” explains Jeanne Lazzarini, RAFT’s Math Master Teacher, “if you wanted to create a circular garden 20 feet in diameter with a border fence, then you could find how long the fence needs to be by using Pi! Just multiply 20 feet by Pi, to arrive at a border fence (circumference) of approximately 63 feet.”
Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, symbolized by mathematicians as the Greek letter π, has been known about for over 4,000 years! Pi is celebrated around the world on March 14th because its first three digits are 3.14….! Pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction and its digits never end, without any repeating orderly patterns. Pi continues to fascinate the world and is used in areas ranging from geometry to probability to navigation; Global positioning Satellites use Pi in calculations for finding locations on the earth.
In October of 2014, taking 208 solid days of computing Pi was calculated to over 13 trillion digits with no repeating patterns! How many digits of Pi can you memorize? The record so far is 100,000 digits by Akira Haraguchi in 2006!
“Our members really love Pi Day. Pi Day is one of those quirky holidays that’s always tons of fun, but also educational as well,” says Grainger Marburg, CEO of RAFT.
RAFT was founded by a former teacher who observed children learning math and science concepts and noticed a pattern of greater understanding when students had a hands-on activity to deepen the learning experience. Now, RAFT has more than 100 different kits available to educators at its resource centers and online store, and has provided nearly 500,000 student hands-on learning experiences.
To learn more about Pi Day, please visit http://www.piday.org/.
About Resource Area For Teaching
RAFT believes the best way to spark the love of learning for the next generation of thinkers, innovators, problem-solvers, and creators, is through hands-on learning. A nonprofit organization since 1994, RAFT serves 12,000 educators each year who teach over 900,000 students. Find out more about RAFT and how to get involved at http://www.raft.net.
Brittany Coleman, RAFT (Resource Area For Teaching), http://www.raft.net, +1 408-213-7208, [email protected]
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