The day brought together several different groups across the city to engage in the themes of the Greensoul project. Cambridge Cleantech worked with Form the Future, Cambridge Launchpad, Cambridge Regional College, the University of Cambridge, and Allia Future Business Centre to make Greensoul Day 2017 a great success.
The first part of the day was a green technology activity day for over 70 Year 5 pupils from a local Cambridge primary school. The nine-10 year-olds took part in four fun team challenges to learn about digital and green technology.
Cambridge Regional College, one of the top Further Education colleges in the country for 16-18 year-old vocational training, was a core partner for this event. They provided their impressive construction space as the venue, and several college students volunteered to help out with activities on the day.
CRC introduced the primary school pupils to cutting-edge digital technologies through two exciting activities. In one session, pupils got an introduction to coding, and learned how to program a Raspberry Pi to make synthesised music. In the second session, they jumped into the world of gamification, one of the largest and fastest-growing industries for tech skills in the UK.
Cambridge Cleantech also teamed up with architecture students from the University of Cambridge, who ran an activity in which pupils worked together to design and build an impressive ‘cardboard city’. In the final activity they were challenged to build an eco-house modelled from discarded offcuts and rubbish, incorporating sources of clean energy and energy reduction features. Each activity got the students thinking about energy consumption and creative ways to reduce this in everyday life. The winning house design featured solar panels, a wind turbine, and a rainwater collection system.
The second part of Greensoul Day 2017 took place in the Allia Future Business Centre, and brought together the users of the building to talk about the Greensoul project pilot. Attendees included a wide range of social and environmental enterprises, tech start-ups and entrepreneurs, and everyone was keen to give their suggestions for how to better manage energy consumption in the building.
The pilot, which will begin in 2018 and run throughout the year, aims to reduce collective energy consumption by increasing tenant awareness of energy consuming behaviour.
Image Abbey Meadows pupils were inspired to learn about green technology