Archer celebrates Pi Day with week of math challenges

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Photo credit: Emma London

For the Pi day festivities, math students decorated each link of a paper chain with a digit of Pi. In addition to creating the chain, students participated in scavenger hunts and fundraisers related to math.

March 14 marks Pi Day, and Archer coordinated math events throughout the week to celebrate. Pi is the mathematical constant whose first three digits are 3, 1 and 4, hence the date of Pi Day.

“I really like math, so I feel like it’s fun to have a week where we do activities celebrating Pi,” sophomore Hannah Joe said.

The math department hosted a Pi scavenger hunt with teams of three to five students who participated in daily challenges for the week. The winning team was composed of juniors Kimberly Tuxpan, Gillian Varnum, Arielle Janger, Kylan Gould and Anouk Braun. Daily math problems were also posted on a poster on the village bridge and on math classroom doors. Some of the problems included: “How many three-digit integers have at least one seven in them?”

“[During Pi Week,] we can celebrate math for once,” junior Maddie Fenster said. “We celebrate a lot of things in this Archer community, but we don’t celebrate math a lot.”

On Friday, a prom fundraiser was held in the courtyard, where slices of pie were sold for $3.14. Students could also throw a pie tin full of shaving cream into a senior’s face for $3.14.

“[Getting pied] was really fun,” senior Sandy Frank said. “I felt like I was not only able to connect with girls in my grade but also other grades as well, like the sophomores.”

Sophomore Ava Thompson shared that she can recite about 18 digits of Pi. Math teachers created a paper chain of the digits of Pi, which was hung on the classrooms across the village.

“I think it’s really fun to play around with numbers and see how they interact with each other,” Thompson said. “Everyone else in the community gets to see that.”