PERRY, Michigan—The month of March is marked in schools across the country by images of shamrocks on bulletin boards and by students dressed in St. Patrick's Day green. But at Perry High School, another day is stealing the month's holiday focus as students turn out on March 14 (3/14) to celebrate Pi Day. This irreverent holiday honors the mathematical symbol for the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, an irrational number for which the non-repeating, non-terminating computation starts with 3.14159…and continues indefinitely.

To celebrate Pi Day at Perry High, approximately 435 students from grades nine through twelve and four math teachers engage in a fun-filled math bash. Throughout the week of March 14, students take part in activities centered on the figure pi, including going on a Web quest to visit various math sites to learn about the history of pi and answer questions surrounding the nature of pi. They discover the name of the Chinese mathematician who calculated pi to 3.14159 by the 3rd century. They learn what the Burron's Needle is in relation to pi. They can describe the Monte Carlo Method in relation to pi and take part in a simulation demonstrating this relationship.

Further, they find that the sequence of numbers representing their birth date (or anyone's birth date) can be located somewhere in the sequence of pi digits. And many have fun sending Pi Day cards to friends and family.

In addition to making good use of their computers, students document their Pi Day activities by taking photos with digital cameras.

The Perry High School event was inspired by math teacher Jan Luft who got the idea after reading an article about a similar event in NCTM Math Magazine. She saw the event as a good opportunity for her students to learn about math and have some fun in the process.

"Students use the Internet often for English and social studies," says Luft, "but they rarely use it for math. There are a great many sites out there for math information. I also wanted the students to perform a designated search to gather helpful and fun information about the amazing number pi."

Luft, who has been teaching high school math for around 15 years, says, "I try to pass the love of math on to my students by doing activities like Pi Day, incorporating graphing calculators and programming into my curriculum."

It appears Luft's enthusiasm is catching. This year, two of Luft's students arrived at school as "The Pi Guys," superheroes dressed in masks and capes, "ready to spread the word about pi," Luft reports. "The whole student body enjoyed their spirit."

Perry High School is a rural high school located between Lansing and Flint, Michigan, with a student body of nearly 600 students. The school is home to two computer labs with between 25 and 30 computers each. Additionally, each classroom is equipped with one or two computers.

Luft says that the Pi project helped students "learn more about pi than they probably ever wanted to know. They discovered for themselves how amazing the irrational number is—it's not just a random assignment of digits to a symbol that we make them learn. It was a lot of fun."