We’re getting activity-ready for the Festival of Cooling

The Festival of Cooling starts next week - taking place at the Rubirizi campus of ACES in Kigali, Rwanda, from October 7th – 10th – and excitement has already begun to spread. This is because the Lego refrigeration kits created for the festival have arrived at the office at LSBU ready to be sent to Rwanda. The kits are primarily for use on Day 3 of the festival (8th October), which focuses on Schools and Education. As Judith Evans and Gideon Mulungi of LSBU explains:

“There are over 40 kits available to give away to schools at the festival and though they are fantastic fun to play with, they do have an educational purpose. Each kit shows all the major components of a refrigeration system and how it is constructed, they even have a compressor with moving parts! The plan is to use the Lego at the festival to teach children (and adults) about how a refrigeration system works. And for wider engagement, teachers will be free to take kits back to their school to share with other classes who are unable to join the event itself.”

The tech team at LSBU built one of the kits and the consensus was that they are “super cool” and “great fun”.

A great start indeed, but what other games and activities can visitors at the Festival of Cooling expect? Well, we have also developed some cold-chain games, including:

• What should be in my fridge?

Test your knowledge of what should be kept in your fridge. Which foods benefit from cooling and should be stored in your fridge to extend storage life and maintain food safety?

• Fridge or freezer?

Find out which foods should be stored in your fridge, and which foods can be frozen. Maybe some can be kept in the fridge and in the freezer! Find out what happens when you freeze some foods and find out how the freezer can be your friend to extend storage life of foods.

• The fridge quiz

Test your knowledge of refrigeration, food safety and how you should use your fridge. Play the game and find out how much you know. We have hundreds of cold-chain questions from the simple to the thought-provoking and fiendishly difficult. If you can answer the most difficult questions, you are truly a clean cooling master!

What’s more, we’re asking schools to get their students involved by finding out the temperatures in their home fridges – as part of our school fridge competition. After they receive their thermometers at the Festival of Cooling, students can:

• Put the thermometer on their fridge and take a photo of it, showing the temperature of the fridge.
• Take some photos (4 max) of the inside of the fridge to show us how their food is stored.
• Get an adult to upload the images to the secure Clean Cooling Network Community, where they will be required to register and log in.

For the student with the winning fridge, a voucher for RWF 50,000 will be won – along with a Fire HD 8 Plus tablet, 8" HD display, 64 GB, together with a protective case (for the winning student’s class).

The reason we’re doing this? Because we have never looked at temperatures in fridges in Rwanda and know of no information yet collected. In contrast, there have been many surveys carried out in Europe – with some revealing real safety issues (e.g. one fridge operated at a mean temperature of 14.3°C, when ideally, a fridge should keep food at 5°C (Biglia, Gemmell, Foster and Evans, 2017). Keeping food at 5°C can ensure food is stored safely, and bacterial growth is minimised. Food that is not stored at an adequate temperature in the fridge will have a shorter shelf life leading to quality issues and potentially food going to waste. We want to ensure that Rwanda, Africa, and the wider world has access to food that is safe to eat with reduced wastage and we’re hoping this survey is a step in the right direction. 

If this all sounds like fun, don’t forget you can still register to attend the Festival of Cooling. With each day bringing something new, you’re sure to get the most out of your experience.

Footnotes:

Biglia, A., Gemmell, A., Foster, H. J., & Evans, J. A. (2017). Temperature and energy performance of domestic cold appliances in households in England. International Journal of Refrigeration, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijrefrig.2017.10.022.