Lerato Cooks Up a Plan: A Green Engineering Story

1. Lerato Cooks Up a Plan: A Green Engineering Story By Emily Disher and Meghan Sorrells

2. Story Overview • Lerato lives in the small village of Nata in Botswana • A friend who goes to a university to study green technology comes to visit • She shows Lerato a solar oven she made which helps preserve resources like fire wood • Lerato uses the engineering design process to improve the oven and create other green technologies

3. Try It Activity • The book instructed us to make our own solar oven • We used a shoe box, aluminum foil, duct tape, clear plastic, bowl, thermometer, and various insulators • We let the box sit out for 30 minutes with each different insulator and measured the change in temperature

4. Results • We discovered that our design was not completely effective because we recorded little to no change in temperature for each trial • The weather played a significant role in our experiment because it was partly cloudy and not very hot outside • We were unable to cook anything in our oven since there was not a significant temperature change with any insulator • Though our design could probably use some improvements, doing this experiment on a hot, sunny day would be much more effective