The Meltdown

The best ice cream in the whole area is at Bashir's cart. One problem: Bashir's cart is a twenty-minute walk from your house, and the walk is straight down a road with no shade, in May. You know this because you have tried. You buy one scoop for your little sister — she asked for it, she waited all day — and you start walking home holding the cup like it is made of glass. Two minutes in, the top goes shiny. Five minutes, it is sliding. Ten minutes, it is a sweet cold soup with a spoon standing up in it. By the time you reach the door, you are handing your sister a cup of drink, and she looks at you like you ate it on the way. Here is the thing nobody at Bashir's tells you: heat is always trying to get in. The hot afternoon air, the hot cup in your hand, the sun on the lid — all of it is pushing warmth into that scoop from every side. You cannot stop the walk from being twenty minutes. But you can build something around the cup that makes the heat take the long way — so slow that the scoop is still frozen when your sister opens it. That "something" is a carrier. A cheap box of the right materials, packed the right way, that a scoop of ice cream can ride home in. Some carriers will lose the race and hand over soup. Some will win and hand over ice cream. The difference is what you pack around it and how — and today you get to find out which. Today, your team is going to build one, load it with ice, and race it against a bare cup to see whose scoop survives.