Vivian, an elementary school student from Howell, MI, held an empty pizza box in her hands and saw its potential.
Following instructions from Earth Rangers, a non-profit organization that empowers kids to take action to protect the environment, she built a solar oven, which uses aluminum foil to trap heat from the sun’s rays to warm food. The instructional guide also includes information about renewable energy sources and their importance to sustainability efforts.
Vivian built the solar oven in a morning and surprised her family with the creation. Next came the fun part—deciding what to cook. Would it be s’mores? Toast? Leftover pizza?
Making a solar oven is one of several activities kids can do to complete the We’ve Got the Power Missions, a program that Earth Rangers has developed to teach kids about renewable energy, including solar, wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal, RNG and hydrogen. The organization has a suite of other missions, too. They’re all freely available to families through the Earth Rangers app, and are all related to tackling our planet’s environmental issues—how to reduce single-use plastic, decrease energy use at home, help pollinators by planting native flowers and more.
“We want to transform children’s concerns about the environment into positive action,” says Sonia Albertini, Earth Rangers’ senior manager of school sponsorship and logistics. “We empower kids to become environmental leaders at home, in school and in their communities.”
Earth Rangers was founded in Canada in 2004; its headquarters are in the Kortright Conservation Area in Woodbridge, Ontario, near Toronto. In addition to kid-friendly, do-it-yourself missions, the organization develops relationships with budding environmentalists by visiting schools to deliver interactive, high-tech programming grounded in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to students in Grades 1 through 6.
