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IrriGate: The African Irrigation Game

Daryl Stump, Carol Lang, Senna Thornton-Barnett, Tabitha Kabora, Cruz Ferro, Becky Naylor, Rob Marchant, Esther Githumbi, Colin Courtney-Mustaphi, Rebecca Kariuki, Phil Platts, Claudia Capitiani

• 25 September 2015
  5pm - 8.30pm

• King's Manor Marquee(map)

• FREE admission
  No booking required

• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

When people think of east Africa they often think of lions, elephants, giraffes, tigers and hippos. These are all there (except the tigers, who live in Asia), but there are also farmers, some of whom have been building irrigation systems for growing crops for many hundreds of years.  ‘IrriGate’ allows players of five and over to play with a model of one of these irrigation systems, and is based on the way farmers used to grow crops at Engaruka in Tanzania up to 600 years ago.  The game has two versions, one a computer game (likely to be nostalgic for anyone old enough to remember Frogger and Pac Man), and the other that allows players to splash about with buckets of water.  The aim of both versions is the same: to open and close irrigation gates to distribute water as evenly as possible in order to grow as many crops as you can.  

Through the game and displays, players will learn how farming can be sustained with only limited water, how climate change and cutting down forests can lead to less water for farming, and how archaeologists and ecologists work out what the environment looked like in the past, and what it might look like in the future.

But be warned, you might get a little wet.

www.real-project.eu

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