I’m going to guess you’ve been to a winter sports game. If it was a highschool game, it was likely, long, boring and uncomfortable. Most of all though, it was probably cold. The first part of the body to get hit will likely be your hands. Your hand are essential for most daily activities. One example of this is drinking water. This activity is essential to your survival, yet it requires two fully functioning hands to do correctly. This simply isn't possible with the kind of chillly hands often present at winter sports games. To be clear, this essentially means that you will—without a doubt—DIE if your hands are cold. But it’s not over yet folks, luckily our chemistry class took it upon ourselves to do what most companies do; squeeze a profit out of the suffering of others. This is where chemistry comes in. Often, when two substances react, energy is either gained or lost. When energy is lost, otherwise known as an exothermic, that lost heat is radiated out to the surrounding area. What we realized is that this heat was essentially this awesome free energy that was being created from nothing and it can be used to heat the human hand! With this simple issue out of the way, we had to refine how we would incorporate this basic technique of chemistry into a commercial project. First, with help from group members and legit science experts Ky Heon and Ben Franks, I hit the lab, testing various ionic salts. The heat released by them was measured using a fancy tool called a calorimeter. This metric was then divided by price to find the most economical option possible. Also factored in was the duration of heat output and max heat (our product must be 100% safe). We ended up choosing calcium chloride. With this revolutionary technology, our team now had to incorporate it into something the masses would actually want. We decided that the best delivery system was a nested bag system. A small packet of water is nested inside a bag of calcium chloride and when the user applies light pressure, the membrane easily ruptures, initiating the chemical reaction. The final step was make choices regarding the material and production. Here at our project, we value nature, and we love polar bears. With this in mind, our team settled on a reusable material; chip bags! I wouldn’t call this the greatest and noblest achievement in science since ever, but you can. Overall, this project was a lot of fun because we got to create a product that is actually pretty useful. Our group worked really well together and created a pretty good end result but we struggled a bit with time management.