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Students from Blue Ridge High School in Lakeside, Arizona have firsthand experience with global warming as they confront water shortages and extreme temperatures. As a result, the price of utilities in their area has increased, pushing more families to resort to cheaper coal and wood to heat their homes, exacerbating the emission conundrum. By examining the largest users of energy, they identified household cooking and heating as responsible for nearly 50% of utility costs nationally and 25% of black carbon emissions. In Asian and African countries, the percentage jumps dramatically to 80% of black carbon emissions. Their idea is to make small changes to how the world heats and cooks on a large scale in order make a big decrease in fossil fuel usage.

Modifying a traditional passive solar cooker design by adding solar panels, a battery backup, PTC (positive temperature coefficient) heating elements, a cooktop and thermal mass, the students created a solar cooker and thermal device capable of continually heating a small room for 24 hours that also works as a stove top and oven for cooking as needed. The heat from cooking can be stored in the thermal mass and radiated back into the room. The design is easy to replicate from readily available materials and can be constructed for less than $100, making it an achievable alternative for literally billions of households across the planet.

Climate change has seen global temperatures rise steadily throughout the world. This change is most pronounced in urban centers due to the prevalence of heat-absorbing areas called heat islands — areas with a high number of man-made structures like roads and buildings. Given the negative health effects associated with higher temperatures, students from Bloomington High School South in Bloomington, Indiana (the national winner of Samsung’s 2023 Sustainability Innovations Award) were particularly concerned about the most vulnerable populations within their communities. They posited that they can reverse the heat-sink effects of man-made structures in heat islands with radiative-cooling public art. Focusing on their town’s public plaza as a proof-of-concept, the students proposed and then actually created a heat-reflecting, structural color mural on the south- and west-facing wall of their downtown public library. Themed around the beauty of rich local ecosystems, the climate-resilient installation combines art and engineering, using barium sulfate microspheres to maximize UV reflectance to provide passive cooling to the building. Following strict safety guidelines, students formulated and created the heat-reflecting paint in their school’s lab. They even tested its efficacy, which showed a 6-degree reduction in heat absorption, proving out their stunning hypothesis. With the local arts-involved youth pitching in to help design the mural, the project doubles as a reminder to the community of the power of STEM-based education.