Can you keep your arctic buddy from freezing in the arctic?
Our arctic buddies are small water bottles that we are pretending are tiny humans (we are mostly water, after all!). We are imagining that we will be dropping our buddies off in the arctic and we need to make sure they are dressed appropriately so that they won't freeze or get wet. We are using found materials like fabric, stuffing, tinfoil, plastic wrap and trying to figure out how we can design a wrapping for our buddy that will keep it really well insulated so that its body temperature will stay at 37C (human body temperature) even when we put them in the freezer.
Today we finished our materials testing by checking to see which materials would be good at waterproofing our outfits. We know from personal experience that when our warm clothes get wet they stop being warm very quickly! Keeping our insulating layers dry will be a very important part of keeping our Arctic Buddies alive. We decided that the tinfoil, plastic wrap, and wax paper all seemed to do a good job of repelling the water in our tests.
Next, we started making our plans. We are each making a cross-section diagram to show our bottle and the different layers we plan to add. We are about half done this part of the project so we will keep working on this next week.
Tomorrow is Fresh Air Friday. We will be doing some activities in the snow, please make sure you have your snowpants with you.
