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| Katie Mollica and Jacob Firman teach children about building their own solar ovens at Lyme Central School on Monday. |
We were invited to participate in Backyard Science Day this week at Lyme Central School in Chaumont by Cornell Cooperative Extension. For our presentation, we built a solar oven to show kids how they could heat up food with the sun alone.
To build the solar oven we would show to students at Lyme Central, I borrowed a design from
Solar Projects: Working Solar Devices to Cut Out and Assemble by A. Joseph Garrison. I started
to build the oven by drawing it out on cardboard paper. It took about 3 hours to
draw and cut it out (you can simplify things by simply
downloading the schematics here). Once I got them all cut, I put them all together with duct tape.
Once it
was all put together, I took tinfoil and covered the front funnel of the oven so it would become reflective and warm up the food inside. Once finished, I named the device “Better Solar Oven.”
There are all different kinds of solar oven that you can built this one
was that we picked it come out pretty awesome. When we got to the school we
talked to students about how it works, and we handed out links to the website where anyone can
print out the directions and building plans to make their own.
