Making a Solar Oven [MakerID-34]

Making a Solar Oven

Fiona and Nikki 7C

When we started to brainstorm, we thought of what we could do that would be fun and also involve science. We both wanted to do some sort of cooking, but we wanted a challenge, so we decided to make a solar oven and melt chocolate in it and make chocolate covered caramels. Our objective for this project was to see if our solar oven would help melt chocolate faster than just sitting out by itself in the sun. We didn't have time to test this, however, we did find out that the chocolate completely melted within 30 minutes.

Something that was challenging was finding out which days would be hot enough to melt the chocolate on.  A constraint that we had in the very beginning was finding our what we were going to cook in our oven. We didn’t want to do anything that was completely raw, such as meat or eggs or dough, just in case the heat wasn’t very strong in the oven, or if there wasn’t enough sun the day we would cook it. There was also a limited amount of box sizes. The usual size would be a pizza box, because it is shallow and can heat up more easily. The pizza box was hard to get, so we ended up with a different one that was deeper and more square. 

One challenge that we had to overcome was that it took a long time to get all of our materials, and when we did, it was confusing to put together. But, we overcame it by improvising if we really didn't understand the instructions, and it turned out how we wanted it to.  

We learned how to manage our time when we didn’t have our materials, and we also learned how to use a box cutter and cut straight edges with it.

 If we had had more time, we would have tried melting other things, other than chocolate, to see the difference with that, too. Some advice for others looking to do this project is to get your pizza box fast, because the pizza box was the only material that we had to get that wasn’t in Q1, and we kept on forgetting it.