Education Technology


Year 9: Random PI

by Texas Instruments

Objectives

The purpose of this activity is to help students become more independent programs and see the surprising link between co-prime numbers and PI, that transcendental number that just keeps popping up everywhere. 

Vocabulary

Mathematics Coding
  • Square-root
  • Proportion
  • Co-Prime
  • GCD or HCF
  • For / EndFor
  • If / Then
  • RandInt
  • Counter

About the Lesson

In this activity students use the GCD (Greatest Common Divisor or Highest Common Factor), Randint (Random Integer) a LOOP and IF THEN statement to write a simple program. There is less scaffolding in this activity, students are required to write their own program! The proportion of randomly selected integers that are co-prime has a very interesting result, believe it or not, it is related to PI.