 And welcome to STEM Chat. This episode is all about Pi and not the Pi you can eat. That's right, because Pi Day is coming up on March 14th, because Pi is 3.14. That's right. And we're going to have lots of fun activities for you to do with your kids to lead up to Pi Day on March 14th. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. There's some fun activities you can do to teach your kids about circles and Pi and circumference and diameter, and they can have so much fun doing it. And one of the things is with sidewalk chalk. And if you don't have a sidewalk or driveway where you can do this stuff, you can totally use butcher paper, a poster board, or even just have your kids draw on paper. I know it's still winter in some places in the country now. Yeah, so I was saying our ground is frozen here. Yeah, I may not work in the snow right now. But the cool thing about this set, I got this on Amazon, is that it actually comes with a chalk compass. And there's actually a bunch of different kind of chalk holders. It's super fun. And even if my daughter is older at 12, we were doing this example for the video. We had fun doing it. So it's a pretty cool thing to do. So I would say the first thing you can do, depending on the age of your kids, is to start, start simple. My daughter had a good tip that to use the chalk and make a mark in the center to be the center of the circle, that in case the compass moved as you were using it, you could adjust it back to the right size. So just play around making circles. And then we decided to make a really big circle using string. And one of the pieces in the box has this sort of like holder thing. So that really helped us keep everything in place. And my husband had to help so I could film this so we can watch the video. This is so neat. I like everyone's moving around to make it. Even more kids, everyone can help out. And the person in the middle has to hold it steady and turn around. But now it's a beautiful, perfect circle. Yeah, it's so fun to do. And so now it's a fun part of decorating. So we thought it'd be fun to do circles within circles and show them intersecting with each other. And then we just had fun coloring. And taking the time to color and just figure out what we wanted the colors to be on the inside. But it just, it was just a fun experience just to be outside and see all the things. It was really curious. My dog Lulu wanted to see what was going on. So she always likes to pose when I do like when I used to work for a craft and pictures to pose. So she's posing hard here. But I think the key to show is that, you know, you're showing them circles. You can actually measure them if you want to. And you can just show them how there's different sized circles. And no matter what size they are, every circle is pie. And it's a nice way to get other people excited about circles, too, because it's out in your driveway and other people can walk in and they're walking by. The garbage man. I mean, it's been really fun. So it's still there. So it's great. We've kept it there. That's really nice. I wish we could do this. Our ground is frozen here. So we can't really get out and do an east sidewalk chalk right now. Well, even if it is frozen now, you can do it at home right now. And in the spring, when things get warmer, this is a activity you can do even outside of pie day. I think it's just a great way again to bring in geometry and circles. And in the summer, it's perfect time to like just have an outdoor, you know, drawing activity. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I really like that working together. That's nice. Totally. Since I have younger kids, we've been having some fun measuring the circumference of things and seeing how it relates to the diameter. So we just find some ribbon or string. The important thing is that it's not stretchy. And we've been wrapping it around different objects that are circular. And then we compare how that relates to the size of the diameter. So here you can see it's like one and then two and then three and a little bit more, which is the point one for, etc. But I have pretty young kids, so we don't really go into the full details of that. But it's kind of fun to play with and measure. Yes. And I know what I think is I think that's great that you're showing this and using really cute like washi tape to do it. And they're having fun and there's no need to go into detail. But as they're older, you can do that. And if you're homeschooling, you can look into the, you know, what are the requirements for math for that particular grade level? And, you know, just start mentioning words as depending on their age level. But I think the key is just to get them aware of circles, especially for your three year old, who is very young. Yes. Yeah. She so she had a lot of one of the things we did before is we went around and searched for things that were circular and did kind of like a hunt. So she had a lot of fun doing that. And then afterward, she said she wanted to try it on squares and rectangles. So we also I'm sorry, not squares and rectangles. After she said she wanted to try it on squares and triangles. And it was actually pretty difficult to find triangles in our home. But we had a lot of fun searching for them. However, I will say she wasn't actually too interested in measuring. I showed it to her once, but then she wound up kind of like freely playing on her own with all of the different circular things. And I figured that's OK as long as she has fun and we're still getting excited about circles and kind of like finding different shapes. Yeah, she's she's tinkering. She's you're she's absorbing that you she did go on the hunt to look for shapes and circles and she wanted to find triangles. And it is getting her excited about other kinds of shapes. So the fact that she's playing around, that's great. Let the kids play, you know, I think it's not being forced learning. It's just for fun. Yeah, it's just a great example of tinkering. She's playing around with the string and doing her own little thing and just having fun. Yeah, yeah, she's been saying that this is how she plays sections. But that's cool. Yeah, she's just having fun playing with the different shapes. A lot of times you see pie as three point one four. But there are a lot of integers that come after the decimal point. As you can see below, the integer is continuing after continue on forever. And that's because pie is an irrational number. It cannot be represented by a fraction and the numbers never repeat in a pattern. Yeah, and this is showing you fire under digits of pie right now. So it's pretty cool to see. And it goes on to infinity. Speaking of irrational numbers, I found while doing research for this episode, an amazing Canadian scientist slash artist. And he does artwork on pie, which really visually helps you see the irrational numbers. The artist's name is Martin Krasinski. He is a Canadian scientist, and I consider him an amazing artist. He's making such amazing mathematical art. We've linked to his website below in the description. Please, if you have time, he just explains in detail how he creates these pieces. So this was his first piece back in 2013. And it really shows how pie is such an irrational number. Every digit from zero to nine is a special color. And you can see there's no patterns to it at all. And this image shows 768 digits of pie. I love this. You can really see how random it is. It's just like random colors everywhere. I think it's easier to understand. Oh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, what's great is he took if you go on his website, he takes this image and he extrapolates it. This is 768 digits, and he takes it to, I think, over 2,000 doing lines. So it's like an extended version of this art concept. OK, so the next image is his exploration in circular and spiral artwork with pie. And this shows 13,689 digits of pie. Yeah, and he used tiny circles in a spiral using the Archimedean spiral because it's a dense layout and with the colors, he's using a red, yellow, blue palette called the Brewer palette. So you can actually read about how he calculated everything, but it goes starts from the top and it goes around from the right all around in a spiral. And I had no idea as a designer about the Brewer palette, but it's it's different shades of red, yellow and blue. And it's very useful for perceptual properties and it's commonly used to display quantitative and categorical data. So you can see it's really beautiful. It's like it looks like a mosaic. It really is. And it looks like infinity, even though I guess it's a thousand digit, she said. Thirteen thousand. Oh, 13,000 digits. Yeah. Yeah, so this is amazing. So we're just showing three, but he has a lot more on his side. This is also one of my favorites. It it's a it reminds me of the artist Mondrian. And this is using a tree map to create this visual representation of pie. It's three thousand six hundred and twenty eight digits in a six level tree map. He uses variable line thicknesses, as you can tell, and using Bauhaus prime colors. It's just beautiful. I mean, you can hang this in your room. He actually does artwork on a site. So if you wanted to have some of these pieces, you can you can put it on a site, but it's just breathtakingly beautiful. And so when I was when I contacted Martin to give us permissions to use his artwork in this video, we we had a wonderful conversational exchange about pie. And I love that math is not just art, but it's so poetic. He told me that this tree map version of his artwork actually made it into a music video by Max Cooper. And he had worked on a music video with another musical artist, Aleph, to on the idea of infinity. So this is a quote. Everyone knows that the digits of pie go on forever. But an interesting thing about forever is that there are many kinds of forever. Some are longer than others, though all are forever. This is the idea of various infinities, which the Aleph to video hints at. And I'll link to the music video below. It's beautiful. It's just like an animation of numbers. It goes along really well with the music, and you can think about infinity. That's wonderful. It's so poetic, very poetic. And I just love the idea of math sort of bringing in this artistry and inspiring music, too. It just all comes together. It's true. So you can't have pie day without actual pie, right? And I don't we don't really eat like fruit pies here. I don't really bake fruit pies. Sometimes I do little mini like tarts and stuff. But our favorite pie is the recipe for minis chocolate pie. So we bake that and I had to actually put it in the fridge overnight so that we could decorate it the next day. And I put a sign so my husband wouldn't eat it. Do not eat stem chat pie. And we were my daughter was really inspired by Martin's artwork. And so we thought, you know what, let's do something different and let's make a decoration on the pie based on his artwork. So since it's almost Easter, there's actually the pastel M&M's are out. So we had more colors to work with. And she picked from zero to nine, which colors to have for each digit. And so you can see, actually, this is the pie right here. And you can see at the top right there, that's thirty six digits. So we actually went thirty six digits for the pie. And we just put the pie symbol right in the middle. And here we go. Pie for pie day. Isn't it cute? It's you just like, you know, let kids kind of think out of the box. And I think we're kind of like taking having fun with numbers, you know, and we can eat a piece of pie. I love how colorful it is. It's beautiful. I will say one thing. Thank you for actual baking things. I usually try and do things from, like, you know, scratch and stuff, but I got a frozen pie pie crust. And I was going to make the whipped cream boat in time and I use the spray whipped cream and it melts. So it didn't stand up as fresh whipped cream homemade would be. So just an idea, if you're going to decorate it, I would. And also I would do that last after you do the pie M&M. So that's something we learned on doing this one. And I think you did something too, right? Before. Yes. Yeah, we've we've made a Bing cherry pie that was a pie pie. We make a lot of pies here. This looks so good. Thanks. Yeah, it's pretty good. We put ice cream on it, too. Oh, well, you got to have ice cream with the pie. So that makes sense. I'll mode. I think it just shows, you know what? I think kids can have fun with math, but then you got to have, you know, some fun dessert for pie. Yes, it wouldn't be pie day without a real pie. I mean, not a real pie and edible pie. Exactly. So now's the time we talk about our favorite things. And this time I have a really fun picture book that relates to math. It's called Circumference and the First Roundtable. And it's sort of like a Knights of the Roundtable story. And we all kind of know the round table and circumference and his lady diameter. They work together and they figure out a way because they can't see each other when they're sitting on a long rectangular table to create the round table. So it's a lot of like math puns. This book actually was published a while ago. I don't know what year exactly, but I borrowed this book from the library digital edition. So it's a whole series. So you can check and see if you're not able to go to the library these days to check and see if you can borrow it online and just read it on your tablet or computer. And it's a really fun picture book. And I think people love these kind of medieval night stories. And this is a really clever stories. It's fun. It's funny. I can't wait to check it out with my kids. So I have this style compass that I really like. It's very affordable. It's about two or three dollars. But it's really nice because since you screw it together in the center, the pen or pencil or whatever you choose to put it, it doesn't slide around that much. Sometimes with the cheaper compasses, they're a little bit difficult to use, but this one is really great. Oh, that's cool. And so that's great for younger kids. And the pencil slipping is a big thing, which is why my daughter likes this stab later one. It actually came in a kit. It's got an actual precise wheel on the inside or you press these sides so that the compass will not accidentally go wide open. You can adjust it. And you can also it comes to the lead here, but it comes in a box and you can actually attach on this this attachment to put your own pencil in if you wanted to. And it comes with extra lead. So if you have, I'd say, a child maybe 10 and up, this would probably be maybe starting from fifth grade on. Get a good one because they're going to need it when they go for school. Having a good compass is really important when you're doing math work. Yeah. And I think it's because it's harder to do if it's not a good compass. And so it makes it a lot less fun and then kids get frustrated. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm really excited. So Terri Selting David came out with her second book for the Renegade Tinkering Club, and it's called Renegade Style. So as you know, the story centers are on multiple girls that work together. And this one centers on Amber Rosenberg, who loves fashion and loves sewing. So I love this because the story here is about the environment and she discovers that fast fashion hurts the environment. And what can she do? And the projects are fun. So it starts out with something like, you know, doing some fancy weaving and she comes up with projects on patterns. I love like Terri's illustrative style to do this sort of like comic book style for doing projects. And then she even moves up to doing a stone circuit like bracelet, which my daughter made in her camp before and she was very excited. So she did this. So this is the project here and she shows you how to do it. So there's a lot of really fun projects and a really good story. So check it out and and continue this. The Renegade Girls Stinkering Glove Style. It looks like a lot of fun. OK, so I'm going to give a rock tumbler update. We finally finished tumbling our rocks. This is how they came out. They actually they came up better than I thought they would. But it turns out that even though my kids had a lot of fun making them, they didn't really like them as much. They like the ones that we find like how they naturally look a little bit more instead. So but we might try it again later as they get older. And I think I did learn a lot of things while I was doing it because we made a bunch of mistakes, which is OK. That's how you learn. Yeah, it's really cool that they actually know the difference now between. Oh, you know what? I want it in its natural state rather than, you know, too refined in the tumbler. Yeah, that's true. Well, I think also it's kind of it's like unpredictable. You don't know how they're going to turn out. And then Easter is coming up. So one of the things that we like to do at Easter is to dye different color eggs. I guess we start with eggs that are different colors. They all wind up being different colors in the end. So we use the brown eggs, the white eggs and the blue eggs. There's also like more red, brown eggs and green eggs you can get to. And it's really fun to dye them because you kind of don't know what color they're going to turn out. It's kind of like a surprise. So I think we actually did not expect to like the brown eggs the most. But we really liked how the brown egg colors came out because they were like extra vibrant and bright. And the blue eggs, we thought it was going to make like a super blue egg when we dyed the blue egg, but it looked kind of similar to how the white egg looked in the blue. Oh, that's interesting. I never thought to dye other color eggs. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for our episode about pie. I hope you found some fun activities to do with your kids to help celebrate pie day. Yes, and don't forget to follow us on Instagram at STEMChat and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.