Make your own Solar Oven!
Today you will build your very own solar
oven out of a pizza box to gather the
sun’s rays and cook a tasty treat. Solar
ovens use solar energy, light and heat
emitted from the sun, to cook food.
Your oven should be designed to
absorb more heat than it releases so
that the food stays at a hot
temperature.
Materials:
You will use the following items to
construct your solar oven:
 Pizza box
 Pencil/pen
 Ruler or wooden skewers
 Scissors
 Aluminum foil
 Tape
 Clear plastic wrap
 Black paper
 Newspaper
 Box Cutter
How it works:
Your simple solar oven will be made
out of a pizza box, aluminum,
plastic wrap, and a sheet of black
paper. The sunlight needs to be
reflected into the oven and the
heat must be trapped and retained
inside by the plastic “window”. We
will begin by cutting a flap out of
the pizza box lid and line this flap
with aluminum foil. This will
reflect sunlight into the box. The
opening will be sealed with plastic
wrap, creating a plastic window, which will allow sunlight to pass into the box, while also
retaining heat. This heat is also absorbed by the black paper to heat the food that is
placed on top of it.
Let’s get started!
Each group will be competing to see who can get their oven to the highest temperature.
Steps:
1. Use a box cutter to cut a flap in the pizza box lid. Cut along 3 sides, leaving about
an inch between the edges of the flap and edges of the lid. Fold this flap out so
that it stands up when the lid of the box is closed.
2. Tightly wrap foil around the inside of the flap, so that it will reflect sun rays. Tape
the foil on the outer side of the flap.
3. Open the box and tape a double layer of plastic wrap over the opening you made
when you cut the flap in the lid. We want to create an airtight window for sunlight
to enter into the box. Make this as tight as possible.
4. Line the bottom of the box with black construction paper. Black absorbs heat, and
this surface is where your food will be set to cook.
5. Adjust the flap so that the maximum amount of sunlight is reflected off the
aluminum foil and into the plastic covered window. Use or wood skewers a ruler to
keep the flap at this angle.
6. Adjust the design to your liking. Example: add newspaper for insulation or more foil.
7. Place a marshmallow in your oven and start a timer. After 10 minutes we will
measure the temperature of your oven.
8. As you wait for the marshmallow to cook, read over the assessment and reflection
questions below.
Assessment & Reflection:
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Calculate the cooking surface area of your oven.
How many marshmallows do you think you could cook?
What can you do to improve the design?
Why did we use black sheets of paper?
What would be the effect of increasing the surface area of your oven?
Can you think of other ideas to retain more heat?
What was the temperature of your oven after 10 minutes?
Modify Solar Oven activity for different grade levels
Middle school
 More hard-coded directions.
 Provide a metric of success. Way for them to assess how they performed. If failed,
why? What did we learn?
 Hands on projects. Focus more on the wrap up discussion time relative to the intro
presentations. What did you learn from this experience?
 Real world applications: where is this technology used? Why is it used?
How to translate this activity to a high school grade level:
 Give high schoolers more design freedom and introduce more advanced concepts.
Present the concepts first, give them various materials, and let them design their
own.
 Present the different disciplines that are involved in this design problem separately
and go over through of them individually. Explain how these are all connected in the
design. (see the NAE report below)
 Allow them to establish their own objective:
 Minimize time to reach a certain temperature?
 Maximize heat?
 Cook a marshmallow as fast as possible?
 Provide career connections
Assessment: was your activity successful?
 Report from National Academy of Engineering
https://www.nap.edu/download/18612#
 Goal: determine approaches and conditions most likely to lead to positive
outcomes of integrated STEM education at the K-12 level
 Key findings:
 A key integrated approach: use of real-world situations or problems
 3 key implications:
 Integration should be made explicit. Integration across
representations and materials is not spontaneously made by
students and can’t be assumed to take place.
 Students’ knowledge in individual disciplines must be
supported. Connecting ideas across disciplines is challenging
when students have little or no understanding of the relevant
ideas in the individual disciplines.
Will need support to elicit the relevant
scientific/mathematical ideas in an engineering design
context
For the solar oven activity in particular:
 Discuss radiant energy and the concepts of adsorption, transmission and reflection.
Introduce greenhouse effect and how this is used in this activity.
 Explore the virtual solar cooker and investigate what combination of materials
result in the highest temperature solar oven:
http://www.pspb.org/e21/media/SolarCooker.html
 Introduce heat conduction, and how this varies with colors. Why do we want to use
dark colors?
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