WACO, Texas (KXXV) — One Waco teacher found a way to bring the Texas heat into the classroom — it's a story almost two weeks in the making from 25 News' Bobby Poitevint.
Inside Kylie McKenzie’s seventh grade classroom at Rapoport Academy, students are working to see if they can use the sun's heat to bake cookies, and they’re using homemade solar ovens to figure it out.
McKenzie used her observations to bring the experiment into the classroom.
"I just had a thought of, 'Oh my goodness, it’s so hot outside — would I be able to bake cookies outside?' — and I was thinking, since we’re learning about the scientific method — I might as well bring it into the classroom"," McKenzie said.
The child-friendly solar ovens are made with cardboard and aluminum bases — students use temperatures guns to help figure out how hot their cookies are getting.
Students say some of the temperatures varied from 136, to 113, to 118, and 122.
While McKenzie says the cookies did not exactly fully bake, some students had mixed and doughy opinions.
12-year-old Cailin Rogers says some of the temperatures “probably" did get hot enough to bake cookies.
"It didn’t really work — they were still a little bit kind of dough(y)," said another 12-year-old student, Marc Filgo.
— that didn't stop some students from trying the safe and edible cookie dough.
"It’s cookies, and I like cookies" Rogers said.
"It’s fun and I like learning things," Filgo said.
While this may be a first for her classroom, McKenzie says The Baking Cookies Lab isn’t going away anytime soon — it’s an experiment both she and the students really enjoyed.
