Fresno City College held its annual Pi Day event to celebrate March 14, the date on the calendar that matches the first three digits of pi. This year’s Pi Day celebration was held on Friday, March 15 and has been going on for over 10 years.
The event is a fundraiser for the Society of Women engineers and the Science and Engineering club.
For the last three years the event had been hosted by FCC instructors Karen Willis and Rebecca Cherry. This year the event was set up like a game show. Different teachers from the other science departments like chemistry, physics, biology, math and geology all join in for the games.
It was a trivia based game and if the teachers answered the questions wrong they got a whip cream pie to the face by one of their students.
Willis and Cherry were asked to host this event three years ago in 2020. The host wanted two female STEM instructors to host the show since March is also Women’s History Month. Willis and Cherry were happy to host and think it is important for women to get into STEM.
“Showing women that we can be in STEM and we can be professional and still have fun and be taken seriously, and go on to support others,” said Willis.
This year the two teams were Team Proton and Team Science Rocks. Willis said the game consisted of three rounds of trivia written by ChatGPT. In between the rounds the two hosts would do different experiments that the teachers could opt for if they didn’t want to get pied. The experiments were a ping pong launcher, pressuring a gallon of boiling water and a plastic bottle filled with nitrogen exploding box peanuts.
The event had a big turn out of about 50 students and people coming to watch including people from the Board of Trustees and a campus dean. Event organizers were happy about the amount of money raised and the size of the crowd.
“We had a lot of students come out and it was super exciting to see. So we really appreciate all the students that came out to watch and we hope we got them excited about what we do,” Cherry said.
The game ended in Team Science Rocks winning. Team Proton had to face the unfortunate punishment of everyone on the team being pied by their students.
