by Carol Sowers

Rivulets of sweat trickled down the nose of Kacee Olson as she guided an infrared gun along the inside of a solar oven she and her friends had designed. She then used a food-thermometer to take the internal temperature of a hot dog cooking on a hand-turned spit inside the solar oven.

Kacee explained, "Our initial design was a box lined with aluminum foil. We were thinking that the aluminum foil would reflect the sun into the hot dog. After testing our design, we learned that it was possible to boost the temperature inside the solar oven by lining the inside with black paper."

Kacee and her team, Brooks Grivett and Darin Erickson, 7th grade students at Mesa's Smith Junior High School, were hoping that the 114-degree heat on that August afternoon would boost the hotdog's internal temperature to 160 degrees, making it safe to eat.

Their first oven, shaped like a house with an angled roof, heated the hot dog's internal temperature to only 110 degrees. When the team modified their oven into a flat box and glued black paper discs to absorb more heat, the hot dog's internal temperature sizzled to 160 degrees, teaching the team that modifying a project is an important step in the engineering design process.

The engineering design process was explored by 46 students from Mesa Unified School District's Mesa, Smith, Powell, and Carson junior high schools participating in the SRP Renewable Energy Summer Internship offered by Arizona State University's Learning through Engineering Design and Practice. This internship is an award- winning two-year old partnership between ASU and the Salt River Project, designed to teach students about renewable energy and inspire them to careers in Science Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). Karen Fisch, SRP Community Outreach Manager, said, "SRP is pleased to be a partner in this project in order to promote STEM career fields for students."

Earlier this year, the innovative internship won the 2009 Arizona Business and Educational Coalition (ABEC) "Best Practices" in Business Education Award for the Best Emerging Partnership, which includes SRP, the Mesa Unified School District, Arizona State University, and the Arizona Foundation for Resource Education, which provides professional development for teachers. Learning through Engineering Design and Practice is led by Tirupalavanam Ganesh, assistant dean for information systems with the Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. "This internship offers a rich collection of hands-on explorations into natural resources, energy conservation, and renewable energy technologies," Ganesh said after receiving the award.

Funding for Learning through Engineering Design and Practice is provided by a three-year $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings' program titled Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST). The summer internship is part of an informal after-school program where students who commit to participate for two years, explore space, robotics, and other weighty sciences. George W. Hynd, senior vice provost for education and innovation, dean and director of the Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education, has said that this is a "project of national importance, resulting in work that is truly making a difference." He also praised Ganesh and his team for "their remarkable efforts and the impact those efforts are having on today's youth and tomorrow's workplace." The Learning through Engineering Design and Practice educator team participating in this internship consisted of Tirupalavanam Ganesh, Lisa Randall, Johnny Thieken, Cindy Bromberg, Dan Medill, Juan Lara, Jamie Gephart, and Lynn Gutierrez.

The three-day internship in early August exposed the students to a menu of projects. In addition to building solar cookers, they used solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells to run miniature cars, and engineered electricity-generating wind turbines.

During a tour of SRP's Arizona Falls , the students saw examples of how businesses like SRP turn to environmental sciences to preserve disappearing natural resources. Formed by a 20-foot drop into the Arizona Canal between 56th and 58th streets along Indian School Road, the falls generate as much as 750 kilowatts of electricity, enough to light 150 homes. The students completed the field trip by visiting the National Guard Armory to see its solar-powered air conditioning unit.

Alison Waterkotte, SRP's community outreach representative for education, endured the heat with the students as they were trying to boost the internal temperatures of their hot dogs. A former elementary school teacher, Waterkotte said working with the Learning through Engineering Design and Practice students is like "being back in the classroom. We talked about convection, insulation, and radiation, concepts they needed to understand in order to engineer the solar cookers. They did great. There is an enormous amount of human potential in this group." Waterkotte served as the host facilitator of the internship at SRP's facilities.

While some students perfected their solar ovens, others were decoding the chemical reactions in hydrogen fuel cells, or fine tuning prototypes of wind turbines used to harness wind for electricity. Wesley Burnham, 13, an aspiring biomedical engineer, said his team built their first turbine using a "two-blade design. But after doing some tests and trials we found out that they wouldn't work as well as three blades. That's probably why when you see turbines they have three," he said. Wesley also said they learned that wind is not a good fit to provide electricity in Arizona because "we don't have enough of it."

In another room, a team of students puzzled over complex mathematical formulas and a new vocabulary (anode, cathode, catalyst, and electrolyte membranes) that described hydrogen fuel cells.

Zachary Kircher, 14, of Carson Junior High, was among other students spinning a hand crank to create electric current needed to kick start the process that splits oxygen from water so the remaining hydrogen would power their miniature cars.

When the hydrogen fuel cell powered cars were wheels down, Johnny Thieken, a Pinnacle High School teacher and a research associate with the Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education, wrote mathematical formulas on the board used by students to calculate the amount of fuel consumed by each car.

Sabrina Hartwig, 14, a Powell Junior High School ninth grader, consulted the formulas and began her measurements and calculations. "It's not easy," she said, crouched over her car on the floor counting laps.

Mike Sherman, a senior at Pinnacle High School, helped throughout the internship explaining the complex procedures and coaching the middle school students in mathematics. Sherman, describing an "engineering career as a possibility," said he learned something about himself during the three-day exploration into the science of renewable energy. "It reinforced my faith in myself," he said. "I never thought I could teach kids."