March 14th is a day to celebrate pi (3.14…).

The attached document is the introduction I use before doing our Buffon Needle Experiment. For the experiment you need a tiled floor and dowel rods cut to a length that equals the width of a tile. Choose which set of parallel lines on the floor will be used. I paired students so that while one student drops the dowel rod, the other records the “hits” and “misses”. One hundred drops is a lot, so I suggest they take turns dropping the dowel rod.  This is a noisy activity. After the experiment is over I reward each student with a Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pie (they fit my budget). The next day I present the results of the experiment for each class and the results for all classes combined. The estimation of pi using this experiment is not very accurate for a small number of drops. A computer simulation that can do thousands and thousands of drops will produce a better estimate.

Pi Day document: 0_pi_day

Online computer simulation: http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/reese/buffon/bufjava.html

The Monte Carlo Method falls in an Operations Research topic which applies math to real life situations.

The Buffon Needle Problem is a geometric probability problem.