THE BEACON SCHOOL TESTIMONIAL
Getting ready to participate in the Keep the Heat project was fun and exciting. The premise of the project is a good one, and one that is clear and understandable to students. I have to say that every one of the students that participated in this project thoroughly enjoyed it. There was a level of competition that the students enjoyed. They all wanted to be able to beat the Styrofoam insulation’s time.
There were some problems with the project, mostly from a logistical standpoint. The box design was a little confusing. Perhaps a schematic with a scale drawing might have been helpful. Also, it was unclear how the wire mesh was to be held in place. It would have made sense to standardize this information so that everyone would truly have the same boxes. The time to construct the boxes was lengthy.
Doing the experiment took a fairly long time. This is okay for working with an individual group or two, but since I wanted to do this with three chemistry classes, there really was not enough time to perform as many tests as the students would have liked.
Perhaps in the future, some examples can be provided to give teachers an idea of the amount of time that they will need to perform an actual run of experiments. The Styrofoam insulation took over an hour just to cool, and I had many groups of students that surpassed that result. Also, it should be noted that it does take 14 to 20 minutes for the box to heat up using a 60-watt light bulb. I would suggest not using soft white bulbs as they do not heat as fast as the standard bulbs do.
I ended up building four test boxes for my classes to use. They had a great time with them. I incorporated the project into my thermo-chemistry unit, and it became a meaningful lesson as well as a fun hands-on experience. I would recommend that others do this experiment. You can easily use it as a stepping stone into math, science or economics lesson.
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