Pi Day is Coming!

Pi Day (March 14th or 3.14) is next week. If you're looking for some Pi Day activities to do or some videos to share about pi, take a look at this list of resources that I've compiled over the years.

Numberphile has a few good videos about pi and Pi Day. Pi with real pies is a three minutes and fourteen seconds video that explains Pi and how it can be calculated.

After showing the video above, you might want to follow up with this video, How Pi Was Nearly Changed to 3.2.


A Mile of Pi, as you might guess, is about a mile of digits.

Exploratorium's Science Snacks site has three hands-on activities that you can do on Pi Day (or any other day of the year).

• Pi Toss is an activity in which students toss tooth picks is a physical recreation of Buffon's Needle Problem.
  
  
• Pi Graph is an activity in which students graph the diameter and circumference of a series of objects in order to see the linear relationship between any circle’s diameter and circumference.
  
  
• Cutting Pi is an activity in which students use string to measure the circumference of an object and then attempt to cut the diameter of the object from the string as many times as possible. In other words, it's a physical way to divide the circumference by the diameter.

Tynker is a service that offers programming lessons for elementary school and middle school students. For Pi Day Tynker has a free lesson plan in which students practice their programming skills by making art based on Pi. The free lesson plan has students use Tynker's block programming interface to create art and animations featuring the digits of Pi. 

Pi Skyline is an art project that has a Pi Day theme. In the project students shade graph paper to correspond to the digits in pi. Then they cut out the graph and place it on a shaded background to create a city skyline effect. Watch this one minute video to see how the project comes together. 

Finally, if you want to give your students a Pi Day ear worm, play the Pi Day Song for them. 

Mozilla Is Shutting Down X-Ray Goggles

Mozilla's X-Ray Goggle's is a service that I've been promoting for years as way to help students understand how HTML works. Students can use it to view and change the HTML behind almost any webpage that they find. The changes happen as a local copy of the page that students could then share with their teachers.

Unfortunately, Mozilla has announced that they are discontinuing support of X-Ray Goggles. On December 16, 2019 Mozilla will close X-Ray Goggles and delete all user data associated with the project.

At the end of their announcement Mozilla recommended looking at Glitch as a possible alternative to X-Ray Goggles. I'd also recommend taking a look at Tynker.

Pi Day Programming Lessons

Tynker is a service that offers programming lessons for elementary school and middle school students. I published a full overview of the service a couple of days ago. You can read that overview here. For Pi Day Tynker is offering a free lesson plan in which students practice their programming skills by making art based on Pi.

Tynker's Pi Day lesson plan has students use Tynker's block programming interface (available to use in your web browser or on Tynker's iPad app) to create art and animations featuring the digits of Pi.

Applications for Education
Tynker's Pi Day lesson plan includes nine pages of step-by-step directions. Despite those detailed directions, if you have never done any programming with your students, I wouldn't make the Pi Day project your first attempt at programming with students. But if you and your students are already familiar with Tynker then the Pi Day lesson could be a fun one for you to use.

Tynker Offers a Good Way to Introduce Students to Programming

Tynker is a service that provides activities to help students developing coding skills. I first tried Tynker years ago and have watched it grow from a simple app to a full-blown coding curriculum for elementary and middle school use. The Tynker coding environment makes learning to code fun and immediately accessible to students in elementary school and middle school. Of course, older kids can use it too.

Getting Started With Tynker in Your Classroom
Register as a teacher at Tynker.com to start using it in your classroom. Registration is easy because you can sign-up by using your Microsoft account, by using your Google account, by using Clever, or by entering your email address and picking a password. One of the benefits of registering with your Google or Clever account is that you can instantly import a roster from those services into your Tynker account. Otherwise, you can manually a roster and accounts for your students to use on Tynker. Either way, Tynker provides a convenient PDF of your students’ username and passwords.

Once you have set-up your account, you can begin assigning courses and lessons to your students. Tynker provides three free courses to pick from (nine additional courses are available in a premium account).Within your Tynker account you can track your students’ progress through each lesson.

Tynker provides detailed teaching guides for each course. The guides include suggested time frames, questions to ask students, standards alignment, and screenshots of what students will see when they’re trying to complete an activity in Tynker. And if you need more support, Tynker has an extensive help center, a community forum, and on-demand professional development webinars that you can access at any time.

What Tynker Looks Like to Students
At its core Tynker gives students a block-based programming interface. Students drag and drop code blocks into place to create a program. The introductory lessons have kids making animations while more advanced lessons have students programming music videos and games. And when students are ready for the hardest challenges they can use Tynker on their own to create Minecraft mods, to control connected robots, build web apps, and create mobile games for use on Android and iOS.

Want to learn more about how you can introduce programming and coding in your classroom? Register for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. 

Tynker Launches an iPad App That Helps Kids Learn Programming

The online programming education service Tynker has released an iPad app for students. The Tynker iPad app features stories that students animate by completing a series of programming challenges. The programming happens by organizing a series of blocks that represent commands. In that way it is similar to apps like Daisy the Dinosaur and MIT's App Inventor.

The Tynker iPad app provides the first story / programming challenge for free. The subsequent challenges require in-app purchases. The first story contains twenty challenges for students.

Applications for Education
The Tynker iPad app could be a good one for elementary school students to use to begin to learn about the logic that is used in programming. Students older than ten or eleven may find the challenges too simple.