seventh graders use solar power to heat ovens

Story by Olivia Jones

What do you get when you mix food, sun, cardboard, plastic, and foil: a solar oven. The seventh grade science classes started this year off with the solar oven project.

During class, students took time to understand energy by learning about engineering, design and solar energy, which was all entailed in the solar oven project.

How did they get started? Research. They looked online at many other solar ovens to get an idea of how theirs should be created. They used sources that they found and that the teachers gave to them.
Students had to come up with a final design and sketch it out  to show to the teachers.

After the teachers approved the design, the students got right to work with many materials, like cardboard, plastic, tin foil, and black paper that they had brought themselves, or had used from the teachers.

Finally, once they were done building, they went through a lot of trial and error to get it right by testing it, then going back to see what they did wrong so they could fix it up for it to work fully. 
Yasir Al Rammahi, seventh grade, said, "It taught us a lot about how powerful and strong the sun is, and how we can use it in different ways." Grant Koeneman, seventh grade, Rammahi's teammate agreed. 

Rammahi, when asked about how they set themselves up for success, he said they brought in the household supplies needed for the project to set them up for the final test, baking the food.
While Jason Lam, seventh grade, said,"We had to find the perfect food to cook with."

Mrs. Katie Russo, the seventh grade science teacher for Team Apollo, said instead of just taking notes and studying the information, students were able to live the experience. She also said that most of her students exceeded the project, but some did fail to get their food cooked.

She also mentioned that many of the students cooked basic items like s'mores, but one of her groups used peaches to cook an unexpected peach crumble pie.

Despite some failures, it was still a successful, sun-filled project that showed the students the real meaning of the energy of the sun.