Make Your Own Solar Oven Pizza Box

Design and build a solar oven with a whole group or as a backyard boredom buster.

Make your own solar oven pizza box.

This step is to just make the top of the solar oven. The solar oven you will build in this activity is a relatively simple one made out of a pizza box aluminum foil plastic wrap and a sheet of black paper. To easily make a lightweight solar oven set a cardboard box inside a larger cardboard box and fill the gap between the boxes with shredded newspaper. On a sunny warm day your oven could reach about 200 degrees f.

Take the front of your pizza box and your ruler with your dark or black sharpie. No campfire needed with this engineering classic. You will cut a flap out of the pizza box. Summer stem isn t complete until you have made your own sun oven or solar cooker for melting s mores.

Line the inside of the cardboard box with black construction paper and cut out four flared squares from a piece of cardboard. To take food out of the oven open up the lid of the pizza box and using oven mitts or potholders lift the glass dish out of the oven. Materials needed for this step. You covered the flap with foil so that the foil would reflect sunlight into the oven.

Measure out 1 inch from the front where you open the box and put down a small dot. Take the 2 sides and do the same thing. From shoe boxes to pizza boxes the choice of materials is up to you. Build and use a simple solar oven.

The black paper. Ovens like this one are called collector boxes because they collect the sunlight inside. You will notice that food takes longer to cook in a solar oven than a regular one. The solar oven you build in this activity is a relatively simple one made out of a pizza box aluminum foil plastic wrap and a sheet of black paper.

Here s what you ll need. Take this fun stem project outdoors the next hot day you have this summer. You cut a flap out of the pizza box s lid and line this flap with aluminum foil so that sunlight can be reflected off of the foil and into the box.