Pi Day Display

Pi is a pretty magical number.  For those of you who haven't taken a math class recently and/or do not use pi on a regular basis, pi is a number that is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  Pi is always the same number no matter the size of the circle.  It is a never-ending, non-repeating, very very very long number, usually truncated down to two decimal places:  3.14.

Math geeks in recent years have taken to celebrating Pi Day on March 14 since the date, when written out with numbers, uses the first three numbers found in Pi.  This year's Pi Day was extra special because when we included the year along with the month and date, we could expand Pi by two additional decimal places (3.1415).  Neat!

To celebrate, I did a little display all about Pi in the teen area of the library.  I found lovely printables online and mounted them on construction paper, pinning them to the bulletin boards on our shelves' endcaps. One of these was a super cool infographic with some neat facts about pi.  The other was a printout of pi's digits in much of its glory.

I also wanted to add an interactive element to this display, but didn't want to put out math worksheets because a) we're not a school, and I'm not a math teacher, and b) that's not exactly super exciting or attention-grabbing.  Instead I found a Pi-themed crossword puzzle and put them in a folder for teens to take.  Since voting has been a popular passive program for us, and since eating pie is one of the more popular methods of celebration on Pi Day, I also asked the teens to vote for their favorite kind of pie.  (For the curious, apple pie was the clear winner with 20 votes.)