School Science Projects ... on steroids

Here is Kristin with the “one square meter solar reflector furnace” we built together while she was in New Canaan High. That focal point was hot, even in the late afternoon Winter Sun. Her teacher was astonished that it was not a circular reflector like all the others he had seen, but she got a good grade anyway.

Kristin/Editor: I recall being extremely proud carrying this behemoth into my 9th grade Earth Science classroom after building it with you over a sunny Winter Break… but I must admit I got into a little hot water over it. Mr. Resnick took one look at this fantastically engineered, scientifically advanced, large scale project and immediately knew I’d gotten a little bit of… help! He made me present it to him after class, maybe to avoid embarrassing me in front of my classmates. I guess I did a good enough job showing him that I indeed did learn a lot during this process, knew the science, and had in fact clearly spent many hours on it (most of my classmates’ projects were fairly haphazard and contained on a single sheet of poster board). I got an A. Thanks, Dad :)