Solar Oven S'mores

     

Finally, our first engineering challenge in Ms.Powell's class. Our goal was to cook s'mores with solar power. Ms. Powell explained that we would have 100 credits to spend on materials to build our solar oven. Some of the materials that were available to the class included tinfoil,  both small and large pizza boxes and even bubble wrap! The class was very excited to start building our ovens with a partner, but first we would need some more background knowledge about  heat energy.  

     As a class we viewed a PowerPoint presentation about energy. We learned that energy is the ability to do work. Not all energy can be used again, in fact there are two types of energy; renewable energy and non-renewable energy. Renewable energy is a source of power that will always be usable or reusable, some sources of renewable energy include nuclear power plants, wind turbines and the sun. Non-renewable energy is the opposite, you can never use this type of energy again, fossil fuels and coal are both non-renewable sources of energy. Solar energy from the sun was an important focal point of the presentation. We would never know if the sun would run out of energy because we would die if that happened. Once everyone in the class felt like experts on heat energy, it was time  to build our solar ovens.

     Now that we were ready, Ms.Powell let us plan our design for our solar ovens with our partners. Once we both felt like we had a strong plan we started building. Many groups had to improvise and change the plan along the way. Once everybody in the class was done with their solar oven, Ms.Powell led the class outside to the parking lot to test the solar ovens. Each kid received a graham cracker, a piece of chocolate and a marshmallow. Using LabQuests and temperature probes, we recorded how hot the ovens were every 5 minutes. Some group's ovens reached up to almost 40 degrees Celsius. Most kids s'mores didn't change much, except for the occasional melted chocolate. Most of our class wanted to make a new oven and try again.

      Luckily the next day, we were granted the chance to modify and improve our solar ovens. Each team was given 100 new credits to spend; we were not allowed to reuse leftover credits, but we could use our old oven. some partners entirely rebuilt theirs while others only built on to their old oven. It was time to retest our ovens, we used the exact same procedure to measure the temperature. This time mostly everyone chocolate melted making the s'mores even more delicious. Some groups almost had temperatures at 50 degrees Celsius. Our first engineering challenge was a blast and the class still had to do data analysis. The whole class are now experts on heat energy and have had solar oven s'mores.