Welcoming Warmth

Challenge
Do you eat more soup in the summer or winter? Do you eat more ice cream in the summer or winter? Do you drink more hot chocolate in the summer or winter? Do you drink ice cold beverages more in the summer or winter? Why do you think this? As the seasons change, our clothes change and so do our diets! In the summer, our diets include colder things to help cool us down. In the winter, our diets include more warmer items to help keep us warm. In the summer, we use coolers and ice to keep things cold. In the winter, what do we use to keep things warm? If you can’t think of something, well that means it’s time to engineer! Your challenge this month is to build a device that fits around or over a paper cup to help keep the contents inside warm for a longer period of time than normal.

Your device does have some criteria and constraints. Only the materials provided can be used in your design. The materials can be placed anywhere outside of the cup but not on the inside of the cup. It can have a cover over the top, but the cover needs to be able to fit the thermometer inside and removable so liquid or food can be put in the cup.

Materials

• paper cups
• thermometers
• water
• rubber bands
• aluminum foil
• felt sheets
• paper
• newspaper
• foam sheets
• wax paper
• thin cardboard sheets
• pipe cleaners

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Hints and Tips for Success

1. Allow students planning and discussion time by having them experiment with the items to see how flexible and movable they are.
2. After experimenting, allow student groups to plan their final design. Include as many ways to improve their thermal insulator as needed.
3. For differentiation, adjust the amount of materials available, show ideas of how to construct a lid or koozie like device, show pictures of coffee-to-go cups with sleeves, take away any of the materials, change the amount of materials needed to be used, set a temperature requirement of loss to not go below. Adjustments could be made to make it more challenging or simpler.
4. Make sure to be using all the same cups, same amount of food/water in each cup each time, and always have a control cup for every group. Explain the importance of the control cup to the students.
5. Try to use warm-hot water so it is not too hot for students to touch in case of spillage.
6. Connect to science and ELA by having students discussing/figuring out how they could perform their investigation and writing the necessary steps to conduct it. Students can also write their conclusions for their device (or the best device) using evidence of why someone should use it.
7. Connect to math by practicing reading a thermometer and graphing the results. Students can also use the data to figure out temperature loss, practice adding and subtracting (especially if using a digital thermometer with decimals), older students can convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, or practice finding range, median, mode, mean with the class data.