Pi Day at ISL

March 14th (3.14) is Pi Day - a day where the wonder and brilliance of Mathematics is celebrated around the world. At ISL we celebrated with a week of Mathematics Competitions. On Pi Day itself STUCO ran a 'Pi off' during break where students wrote down as many digits of Pi as they could. All the participants were impressive but astonishingly Tomoki in year 10 correctly wrote out 75 digits! After school that day the Mathematics Department, ably assisted by an excellent group of year 12 CAS students, ran an Interhouse Competition for years 6 to 9.  Each house fielded 3 teams of four, with each team being made up of a mixture of year groups. The competition consisted of two rounds. The first one was a crossnumber challenge (like a crossword but with numbers) and the second round was a nail biting relay round involving some speedy running to pick up the questions and extremely focussed problem solving. Whilst all this was taking place one of the year 12s was tasked with circulating around the covered area identifying which students really stood for their Maths and team working abilities. It was such a pleasure to see the students so focussed and working together across year groups. All of the students were very impressive but a special mention must go to Shristi (year 8), Luka (year 8) and Luthando (year 9) who caught the year 12's attention. 

The final result was: 3rd Place - Luangwa, 2nd Place - Zambezi and 1st Place - Kafue. Congratulations to Kafue!

The year 12 students then devised a competition format to take place during second break for the remaining days that week. On Tuesday it was Year 10s turn, Wednesday year 9 and Thursday year 8. (Unfortunately year 7 missed out due to the unexpected day off school). Each house was posed questions (written by the year 12s and tailored to the particular year group) and the person who answered correctly picked up a bean bag and ran to the other end of the court and deposited it in a bucket. After fifteen minutes of frantic question answering and running the house with the most bean bags in the end bucket was declared the winner. The year groups winners were: Year 10 - Zambezi; Year 9 - Luangwa and Year 8 - Zambezi. All of these scores will be added into the overall house cup.

The Maths teachers would like to congratulate all the students who took part for their fantastic enthusiasm and thank the year 12s for all their efforts including coming up with the breaktime competitions. 

Photos available here: Pi Day 2022 Photos