In cold places, keeping a house warm can be very expensive, and it's important for those homes to be designed with heat conservation in mind.
We gave kids LEGOs, some tinfoil, different colored paper, and ask then to build a house that could get the hottest in 20 seconds.
There was a lot of experimenting, but eventually kids figured out that wrapping their house in tinfoil would make a difference to the temperature!
Through more iteration and design (and a little hint from our instructor), kids started experimenting with building a tinfoil valley, which would attract all the light from around the house and focus it all into the house.
We had also given kids different colored paper, and through some experimentation kids found that having black paper at the floor of the house would keep the house the hottest.
Our young engineers ended up with something that is reminiscent of thermal power stations, which reflect light into a central thermal conductor to generate power!
The second challenge was to take the hot water pumped up from below, and build a structure that could help retain as much heat as possible from the hot water.
There are lots of different options to optimize temperature. Kids experimented with building small or large pools of hot water to generate steam, building a cover to trap the steam for longer, and building a maze for the water so it stays trapped for longer!
