Week 2 of A STEM Summer’s theme is Farms. For our environmental engineering project, we built a solar oven. (Full directions can be found here.)

We did not follow the directions exactly in that we didn’t use a pizza box. So feel free to “wing it” on the materials. Since Puget Sound is not known for hot summers, we also had to be flexible about sunshine. It was only in the mid-60s when we tried cooking in our solar oven, but this was still enough to melt the chocolate.

I say “we”, but really it was just Jenna(3) and I building this today because Bruce(7) was in a bit of a funk. He did decide to participate for the smores eating portion of the project however. The good news is that we ended up proving that this was a fun project for a preschooler to do too.

A few days later Bruce was inspired to tackle the project himself using random supplies from our house.  We are waiting for sun to give this oven a try!