By Cathy Wang | Staff Writer

The Irvington Math Club celebrated Pi Day on March 14 with a Pi Day Exhibition at American High School, while Girls in STEM Club attended the “Wow! That’s Engineering” field trip at San Jose State University.

Math Club hosts Pi Day Exhibition

In a collaboration with American High School’s Math Club, Math Club organized a Pi Day Exhibition in the American cafeteria, where around 80 students and parents congregated to eat pie and play interactive math games.

Irvington and American High student volunteers organized and ran several different stations, including a station to play “24,” a station to unlock metal ring puzzles, and a station to make origami figures. They also cut and served slices of apple, cherry, berry, and nut pies for participants.

The event culminated at the presentation about the history of pi and the final countdown to 9:26:53 pm. Participants also had the opportunity to “pie” certain math club officers and American High teachers as a reward for winning games.

“Even though I struggled with a Sudoku puzzle, I enjoyed several funny math jokes related to pi,” said Irvington junior Cyrus Soleymanzadeh. “I thought the highlight of the event was watching someone pie Cathy [Wang, the author of this article].”

Freshman William Zhang offered suggestions for next year’s Pi Day celebration. “We should still have the presentation with interesting facts about pi that most people are not familiar with,” he said. “There should probably be more games like we had today, and we definitely need pies to fill our hungry bellies.”

Girls in STEM Club attends “Wow! That’s Engineering” field trip

The Girls in STEM club organized a field trip to the “Wow! That’s Engineering” event at San Jose State University. High school girls were introduced to STEM careers and had the opportunity to talk to female college students in civil engineering, electrical engineering, and other engineering fields. They also engaged in hands-on workshops and interacted with career and college panels to learn more about ways to pursue a STEM career. Club advisors Mr. Fung and Ms. McAuley organized the field trip before the club was established, hoping to expose girls to the field of engineering.

“This event is to introduce more girls to engineering fields since there is an underrepresentation of women in these fields,” Girls in STEM publicity commissioner and sophomore Mary Xu said. “Many girls don’t know what engineering is about or do not think they will be good at it.”

Apart from the estimated 15 students from Irvington, there were more than a hundred people from the Bay Area attending the event.

Girls in STEM president Asad Mohammad, a junior, also designed a Pi Day t-shirt inspired by Ariana Grande’s song “Problem,” sold for $12. The money from t-shirt sales “will fund the various lab activities we do during our meetings and events,” Mohammad said. “For example, our latest service event at Hirsch, the Silly Putty lab required a large amount of supplies. We used our income from Club Rush to fund the lab.”