The Brown Bag STEM Challenge- Solar Ovens

This week’s Brown Bag STEM Challenge is designing and building a solar oven…and to test it out, what better than to make some s’mores!

Small pizza boxes are required for this design, but students can make small “ovens” from folding card stock into boxes as well.  When preparing this activity, the teacher should make sure that all pizza boxes are the same size.  The boxes can even be reused by lining the bottom with a piece of wax paper, parchment paper of cling wrap. (Caution that this will skew your results, so make sure each box has the same lining.)

Students will work together to design the best (fastest working) solar oven from the materials available.

When it is time to test, students can place their solar ovens in the sun (No sun? No problem.  Try a low-cost aluminum clamp lamp.)  and compare their results to a control.

The Brown Bag STEM Challenge bundle pack includes 10 high-interest design challenges that use low-cost materials that (almost all) fit into a brown bag!  Challenges comes complete with design briefs, STEM notebook pages and a PDF slide deck. In each challenge, students work in teams to design, build and test solutions, following NGSS Engineering Design Performance Expectations.

Get the Brown Bag STEM Challenge Bundle Pack with 10 Design Challenges including Solar Ovens!