Thursday, March 13, 2008

The Best Pi Quiz on the Web?

I strongly encourage you or your students to try Eve Andersson's Pi Trivia Game.

I tried the quiz on Tue and got 21/25 right. I'll bet some of you get a Pi-Fect score the first time! Some of the questions are easy but many require technical or historical knowledge of pi. Many of the questions involve fascinating facts about π, so it is both educational and fun. The multiple guess format makes it less intimidating but the distractors are tough to crack! As soon as you submit your answers, you get immediate feedback.

What is really nice is that the quiz changes when you refresh the screen, since the questions are randomly generated from her large database. There will be some repetitions of course, but there are enough questions to keep it interesting and any duplication will test your recall!

Also visit her main site, Pi Land, to get more background and some excellent book references for the mathematics and history of Pi.

This is probably not intended for middle schoolers, although I'm guessing one could do some web searches to find most of the answers. Might be a fun activity for your students. If you have a bank of computers in the classroom, tell your group they can try the challenge in the last 10-15 minutes of class after they've completed their work. Highest 3 scores get a Pize - ugh...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Darn, I only got 12/25 pts ..

Dave Marain said...

Florian,
Take it again - most if not all of the questions will change!

Also, read the comments the readers left on Eve's home page. They are thought-provoking to say the least. Apparently, Eve has had a faithful following for many years and many ardent devotees of her site. Impressive...

Anonymous said...

14. And I guessed a lot.

Jonathan

Anonymous said...

Didn't take the quiz, but we did celebrate pi day in class today. Good fun. We read Sir Cumference on the Dragon of Pi. I had the students bring in pies, and we used those to calculate pie by measuring the circumference and the diameter.

A group also spent the day outside writing the digits of pi around the sidewalks and playground. They got between 3,000 and 4,000 digits.

Pretty cool!