Solar Cooker Progress

     For our solar cooker, we are making a parabolic cooker. I thought it was going to be easy, but it turned out to be a lot of work the first day we started. To catch the sun, we covered an umbrella with foil so it can reflect the sun onto the food itself. For the aluminum foil to actually work, you need to make it as flat as possible so that it will not be a diffuse surface. A diffuse surface is created when the surface is not flat and that causes the sun's rays to go everywhere in every direction. This was a challenge to make the surface flat because foil is easily bumpy. We wanted to test it, so our engineer, Leslie, took it home. She told us that it worked and the sun reflected off of the surface. We are still trying to figure out how and where to place the food so that the sun directly hits it, but I think overall we are doing a pretty good job.