Photo by Crystal Reed
Macie Fleshner uses a compass to measure on her corn hole board project during Sheri Bruyn’s calculus class at Okaw Valley High School. Bruyn was one of two teachers in the area to receive a grant from the Illinois Retired Teachers Foundation.

•April 14, 2021•
By Crystal Reed
NP Writer

Sheri Bruyn’s students are taking what they have learned in her math classroom and using it to build cornhole boards and bags in the shop at the high school. The creation of the bean bag toss game utilizes several math concepts.
Pythagorean’s theorem is used to make the board a perfect rectangle, surface area is used to calculate the amount of paint needed and volume is used for the cornhole bags which are filled with corn. Another math concept, a quadratic function, will be used to record the path of the bags when they are thrown. Students will measure the height and distance the bags travel, transfer it to a graph and then find the quadratic equation relating to the bag’s path.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.