3.14 or an Apple Pie?
Joey Smith
By David Garcia
3.14 is a number that we all think about when we hear the word Pi unless you slept through math class. In this case, Pi does not stand for either 3.14 or the food, it stands for Primary Immunodeficiency. It’s a rare disease in which some of a person’s affected immune system is either missing or has some sort of dysfunction.
It is truly unfortunate, but that is why Pi Week is so important; it raises awareness and it educates the unknown to the harsher things in life. We should not only enjoy our lives but help the life that just needs a helping hand.
In less depressing words, Pi Week at Taft College was actually really awesome and fun. Through the four school days of March 13-17, we had a couple of two-hour events that students and staff participated. These events all took place inside the ConnExpo room inside the cafeteria.
Now to the main events, Monday was one of the biggest turnouts of the week according to Kaila Haslam who was filling in for the activities coordinator.
She said that on Monday a bunch of people showed up, mainly men’s baseball and women’s softball players (they were there to settle their differences on whose is better).
The task at hand was to build a balloon tower using only tape and of course balloons. Haslama does not remember exactly, but she does believe that the women’s softball team won with the highest tower and earned awhole lot of tickets. They also won bragging rights.
Tuesday’s turnout was not that bad according to Joey Smith. On this day, the participants had to construct a catapult out of rubber-bands and a spoon. The exact point of the game was not clarified, but from what was understood, it was to build the catapult and to see who could catapult an item the farthest. The winner of this particular event was Delyn Calloway. She took home or took to the fish bowl a whopping 12 tickets! Which believe it or not is actually a good amount.
Wednesday was a grand total turn out of two for the first hour of the event; Haslem said that most likely later on in the day the regulars would return. The event for that day was to build a penny boat. The goal was to build a boat out of foil that could hold as many pennies as it could until it sunk. I, unfortunately, had to leave before anyone other the Joey Smith and I were able to show off their engineering skills.
At the time that I left, Joey set a pretty high bar to beat; his revolutionary design saved the lives of 197 pennies until we added the last penny to make it 198 that sunk the boat to the cold dark waters bellow to never been seen again.
I, on the other hand, only succeeded with 96 pennies. I do not have a future in engineering.
Everyone that participated received a ticket. For each event such as the penny boat, for every 25 pennies we received 1 ticket. We put our information on those tickets and placed them inside a fish bowl. At the end of the week, a ticket would be pulled from the bowl and that one lucky winner will take home a brand new Ipad MINI.