References

eHow. (2010). How to Make a Solar Oven. April 22, 2010 from
www.eHow.com/how2083make-solar-oven.html.

40 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day's 40th Anniversary. (2010). April 22, 2010 from
www.goinggreen.today.com/category/green-projects/.

Benefits of Solar Cooking. (2008). April 15, 2010 from
http://www.sunoven.com/usa/benefits-solar-cooking.php.

Make Your Own Solar Cooker. (2006). April 16, 2010 from http://www.uberpest.com/cooker.html.

How to Make and Use a Solar Oven. (2010). April 21, 2010 from http://www.wikihow.com/Make-and-Use-a-Solar-Oven.

Reflection

The thing that surprised us the most was that we were not able to cook an egg in the oven without it drying up. Using the sun is not the best way to cook eggs.

But for the chocolate, it took about 3 hours for it to melt completely. That is a long time for melting chocolate. Even if using solar ovens is the cheaper, easier way to go, it’s not always the fastest, most efficient choice.

Making the solar oven was easy, and didn't take that much time. The thing that took most of the time was actually cooking the food. Making the solar oven only took about 45 minutes where trying to cook food on it took hours.

Our attitude towards going green hasn't changed throughout this project because it took more time and energy to do something that would normally take minutes. Seeing as we couldn't even cook an egg on our oven, we think it would be very difficult to make anything else let alone a meal.

We think that one person is able to make a difference, but mostly for themselves. For everyone to be able to go green would take lots of time and effort, but we guess that if that one person put in lots of time and effort, they could make a difference for our grandchildren. If we don't start to go green, our grandchildren won't be able to take a breath outside without the air being smoggy and polluted. It is important to think about our environment, and everyone should think about going green.

Cooking in the Oven

So we made our ovens, tried to cook an egg in it, but they egg ended up just drying out.

We then decided to put chocolate in the oven to see how long it would take to melt. The two chocolates we chose to use were Hershey's kiss and Reese's peanut butter cup mini.

The egg was put in the oven at 6:40 AM. Then at 10:00 AM it started to get hard. At 11:22 AM the egg was drying up. Then, at 12:15 PM all the egg whites were dried up and all that was left was the yolk, hard.

The Hershey and the Reese’s peanut butter cup were put in around 11:30 AM, then at 11:55 AM the Reese’s was half melted, and so was the Hershey’s. Then at 2:30 PM, both the Reese’s and the Hershey’s were melted, but the peanut butter of the Reese’s was still there.

Making the Ovens

Materials:

• Medium sized-box with lid
• Smaller box to fit into the medium box
• 75 square feet of aluminum foil
  
• Newspaper
• Scissors
• Plastic wrap
• Stapler
• Black construction paper

After we got all of our materials, we began to assemble our solar oven. First we put the smaller box into the medium sized-box to make sure there was a 2-3 inch gap between the two. We then lined the medium sized-box with crumpled newspaper. Then, we placed the smaller box into the medium sized-box and filled the gap between them with more crumpled newspaper. We then lined the smaller boxes sides with aluminum foil and lined the bottom with black construction paper. Then we took a piece of cardboard about the size of the medium box to make reflectors and covered them with aluminum foil. The reflectors were then stapled to the outside of the medium box .