Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Solar Oven Challenge and Sugar-Making

Today we made the ovens. The kids were so in to the challenge and they took to it so well. To start they had to design and build their ovens out of recycled materials and insulate them against heat loss. They used black paper, old towels to attract the sun's energy to the ovens and then used recycled chip bags to reflect the sun's energy inside the oven. The top surface had to allow light inside so most used a clear plastic top that they taped to the box.

Inside our ovens we cooked chocolate chip cookies. What was fantastic was that the students measured the temperature inside the boxes and were blown away that they got up to 70 degrees celsius inside. It was also awesome to see that they were really into it and it wasn't just for the cookies. Well, okay, maybe it was.

Another awesome project happened after school. A student of mine is just wrapping her self-directed experiment. She may be posting her comment to the blog later but I will give you the highlights. She took sugar cane, boiled it to get a sugar water solution and then evaporated the water out to make brown sugar. We may have cooked it a little hot because it sort of burnt more than we were expecting but it was awesome. I'm so proud of the science that is going on in my classroom. These kids are really into it. I think I love my job again. (There were darker times before that made me question this so I am happy to say them times are over!)

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