Space Invaders

Event Year: 2025
Event Location: Cocoa-FL
Competition: Solar Energy Cook-Off
Division: 6-8
School: Milwee Middle
Team Name: Space Invaders
Project Name: Space Invaders
Team Size: 4

All four of our teammates attend Milwee middle school. Our school has competed in Energy Whiz for the last 13 years and we have won 7 of the years we’ve competed. We have not competed in any other solar cooking events besides Energy Whiz. A fun fact about our school is that Milwee has its own greenhouse. The greenhouse allows us to acquire fresh fruit and vegetables to use in our dishes.

Our teacher Ms. Unterreiner helped us generate concepts and our teacher Mr. Kallin helped us with cutting the plexiglass using an OMT (oscillating multi-tool) for the top of our oven.

Our team was inspired by previous years solar oven designs figuring out what had worked well and what didn’t work out so well for that team. Using that information, we made our solar oven using the good parts of each design to create a design that we believe will make our oven the best it can be.

Some materials we used during the construction of our solar oven were a cardboard box found in the classroom to create the base of our cooker, an insulated cooler brought in by our teacher to create a more insulated area for foods that may need hotter temperatures and/or longer cooking times , insulation foam found in the classroom to help hold the heat in our cooker to cook the food, black spray paint found in the classroom to help our cooker reach higher temperatures, a reflective material found in our classroom to reflect the sunlight into our cooker.

Our team hypothesized that our cooker will heat up to 275-300 degrees Fahrenheit. We believe this because of how much light our reflectors can reflect there should be enough heat in our cooker to reach those temperatures. When we tested our oven it got to 175 degrees Fahrenheit in 30 minutes in cloudy conditions.

Please enjoy our video and thank you for for reading our webpage!