Friday, May 15, 2015

Solar Ovens, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Baked Apples

To end our amazing year, the fourth grade students in Mrs. Rodriguez and Newchurch's classes put all of their math and science skills together to complete this culminating activity.  They made solar ovens.  In them, the students were going to cook chocolate chip cookies and bake apples with cinnamon and sugar.  Sixteen ordinary pizza boxes were converted into an energy source providing the heating capacity required to cook food, with the help of the sun of course.  Aluminum foil and plastic wrap was used in such a way as to create a convection oven in which heat from the sun was trapped in order to cook whatever was placed inside.  Now, the students learned a lesson in patience as well.  You see, it takes a very long time for items to cook in a solar oven, especially when the temperatures were just reaching the 80's.  We decided that July and August would be the optimal times for cooking in a solar oven in Louisiana.  After the oven were constructed, we used more of our math skills to figure out how many apple slices would we get if the slicer cut the apples into eighths and we had 8 apples.  Then, how many slices would we each get if we had 22 people.  Would there be any leftover to share with the office or other classes? Turns out the wind also played a role in the cooking process and took out one pizza box oven and all of it's contents.  Luckily though, there was enough for every student to enjoy two cookies and three apple slices.
It was an experiment they will not soon forget!

http://youtu.be/zWHvXNZst8k

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