11th Grade Project
Water Heater Benchmark
11th grade was a difficult year for many people and that’s because we were all introduced to physics. Though challenging it was one of the most interesting and innovative courses I’ve ever taken, and it didn’t hurt that it also tied in with what I was doing with my pre-calc class at the time. The very first benchmark that was assigned for this class was the Water Heater Benchmark where we had to successfully bring a glass of room temperature water to a boil. This was where our innovation really had to take place. I worked on this project last year with my friend Amy.
For our Quarter 1 Benchmark our assignment was to create and build a design that would produce a working water heater. Unlike many other people’s ideas, we decided to eliminate the so called middle man, for example, maybe a device that moves an object that then heats the water, and dive straight into the chemical aspect of what can mixed together to heat the water up which brought us to hand warmers. Hand warmer packets are filled with natural ingredients that when exposed to air, begin to heat up and continue to do so for around 10 to 20 minutes. We believe that our water heater will produce hot water because instead of building an entire mechanism from scratch, that we would find something that already exists in our everyday lives and is easy to come by, take it in our own hands, and change the whole concept of it around to make something even greater.