Nature's Kitchen: Solar Box Cooker Experiment

The Materials Science and Technology Teacher's Workshop (MAST) provides this activity to support solar energy curriculum. The goal of the experiment is to allow students to create a device to cook food with energy from the sun. The experiment teaches the procedures to build a solar cooker to use if trapped without a cooking stove while camping. The introduction is very basic and the instructor can opt to build the solar cooker beforehand to save class time. In the end, several cookers will be built, and the degree of cooking effectiveness is monitored through several small pieces of potatoes cooked over several hours. The lesson includes step by step directions for the experiment. Discussion questions and teacher notes are also included.