Having the boys talk through a great social media math project by Dillon Berger

Dillon Berger shared a great social media math project on twitter last week:

Let’s see if we can approximate π

Pause the video then answer the poll in the thread pic.twitter.com/6EUibzcMay

— 〈 Berger | Dillon 〉 (@InertialObservr) July 17, 2020

I thought having the boys play with / talk about it would be fun. It turned out to be a better project than I expected as they’d not really seen any Monty Carlo-type modeling before.

My younger son went first – I always love hearing how kids describe mathematical ideas when they seen them for the first time. He also does a nice job understanding the chance of a dot being inside the circle, which made me happy.

My older son went next. He seemed to understand the probability ideas pretty quickly so we played with the gif a bit. We didn’t find too many times when the dot landed outside of the circle, which was sort of funny.

Also, it was really fun to hear his thoughts about how we could use the idea in Berger’s tweet to find the area of random shapes.

I think Berger’s social media game is a really great math example to share with kids. The math ideas behind it are something that they can get their arms around. Who knows, maybe they could create a few other similar explorations, too.