Solar cookers for sustainability in physics

I am planning a presentation called "Solar cookers, a multi-topic apparatus for lifelong learning" to give at the American Association of Physics Teachers' winter conference in Orlando, January 2014. http://aapt.org/Conferences/wm2014/

According to Sharon Traweek, author of Beamtimes and lifetimes:the world of high energy physicists (1988, Harvard University Press), physics is presented as "a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder—for a world outside human space and time." (p. 162)

Physics educators speak of "bringing relevance" into the physics classroom, and examples given are physical situations as confirmation of canonical concepts. A radically different approach, which I shamelessly urge us all to try, would be to introduce relevant physical situations and let the students and the situation determine the concepts to be studied. The pedagogical methods involved would be largely those of inquiry.

One situation ripe with opportunities to learn about physics is that surrounding solar cooking. After my course on solar cooking, I expect my students to think about physics when they cook, in perpetuity—Not because I gave them concepts and told them how they are involved in cooking, but because they thought about cooking concepts and learned how they were involved in physics. In short, think of physics as applied cooking, not the other way around.