DECATUR -- What do you get when you take a shoebox, aluminum foil, wax paper, a Hershey's candy bar, a marshmallow, a graham cracker and the sun, and mix them together? The ingredients for a sweet chocolate treat.
Students of Stormy Pruitt's sixth-grade science class at Decatur Middle School performed an experiment on Oct. 29 in which they were tasked with putting all these ingredients together to see how the rays of the sun can heat an object enough to bake it.
First, the young scientists came up with a heating device, in this case, an oven made out of an old shoebox. First, they cut a square out of the top of the box and taped a piece of wax paper over it. Next, they lined the inside with foil, reflecting side up. Finally, they constructed an aluminum reflector that was taped to one side of the box. Once this was complete, they began to assemble the three items to bake inside the box.
Using a nearly 100-year-old recipe, the scientists put the graham cracker on the bottom, then the marshmallow, and finally the piece of Hershey's chocolate. Then came the power of the sun.
Putting their shoebox ovens on the sidewalk next to the gym and adjusting the reflector toward the raw ingredients, they positioned the box ovens to get the maximum amount of sun on the object below. Then it was a matter of waiting for the results.
After about 20 minutes, long enough to briefly discuss the experiment, the students returned to the sidewalk to check their results.
What did the scientists find when they returned to their outdoor laboratory? A pair of s'mores.
The heat trapped inside the oven by the wax paper and the foil melted the chocolate over the marshmallow and graham cracker, thus creating the classic campfire treat.
Now what to do with the end product? Why, eat it, of course, and that is exactly what they did.
This experiment showed that the earth derives its source of heat from the rays of the sun. Those rays filter through the different layers of the atmosphere. What is not absorbed by plants and other objects is reflected into space -- a perfect lesson in thermodynamics.
