PhDCupcaker

Where has the time gone? I last posted on this blog when we were still in Michigan. Don’t fear – I haven’t given up cupcaking – just haven’t posted. I could not let Pi Day go without a post though… I mean, people would probably start to worry about me or something. [I’ve also added a link on the right to donate (if you can) to my Great Strides Walk to raise money for research and to support one of my students whose daughter has Cystic Fibrosis – Every dollar counts!]

We are officially settled in Lincoln, NE. We actually have furniture in our living room now and we are settled in at work as well. I am in my second semester at UNL. I just had my annual review meeting yesterday! I’ve been teaching secondary mathematics methods and I absolutely love it! I had a great group last semester who are now student teaching and I have a great new group who helped me celebrate Pi Day this year! They even let me take some pictures of them! :-)

So, I wanted to try something different this time around – not regular sized pies or not cupcakes. So, I made Pi”e” Pops. I found a recipe for doing them completely from scratch, but opted to buy a pie pop machine. It it was only $12 and was well worth it! I made the ones we are holding first – apple pie pops and piped the digits using candy melts. It took quite a while to pipe all those digits, so when I made the second batch using bits of toffee and a pinch of salt (which I don’t have pictures of) I opted to just use an edible marker for the digits. To be honest, the candy melts looked way better, despite the time it took.

I figured these weren’t going to be that easy to transport as is so I decided to wrap them up a bit and attach a little gift tag.

First we took the group picture. After that we of course listened to Lose Yourself in the Digits. If you haven’t heard this, you need to check it out!

Then it was time to find Pi! We engaged in a sequence of activities I combined from The Interactive Mathematics Program, called Discovering Pi. Each group had different polygons – square, hexagon, octagon, etc… and were asked to circumscribe a circle and use the polygon to estimate the circumference and area of the circle. We then used a spreadsheet to look at what would happen as we increased the number of sides of our polygon.

Oh yeah, and then we ate our pi pops!

Thanks to all of my students for letting me post these pics and for indulging in our Pi Day shenanigans!

Wishing everyone a VERY Happy Pi Day!