By Noha Zeitoun, Content Intern, PSI
Looking for a fun, hands-on way to communicate important messages about global health?
Here are four games that are not only fun to play, but also help teach health challenges around the world.
- Club 99
In Haiti, men who have sex with men learned about how to have safer sex by rolling the dice. Literally.
At Club 99, MSMs sat around a colorful game board taking turns rolling the dice and picking a card that corresponds with the spot where they landed. The cards had questions on them as well as dares, including putting a condom on a wooden dildo — while blindfolded. It wasn’t long before everyone was laughing and showing off their knowledge of how to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS.
Club 99 was developed by PSI’s network member in Haiti, OHMaSS.
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Health workers are the backbone of global health, especially in hard to reach areas. In Vital Pursuit, an online game created by Intrahealth International, players have an opportunity to learn about the difficulties health workers in the developing world regularly face. Players start in Kenya, where they take on the role of Irene Mwende, a 16-year-old girl who dreams of becoming a nurse.
Throughout the game, Irene has to make a series of tough decisions: Should she agree to marry at 16, as many of the girls in her town are doing? How will she pay for school? What should she do when she is asked to give a needle injection to a patient but no gloves are available for her to do it safely?
While making these tough choices, you can see the character Irene age as you play. The ultimate goal is for Irene to grow old and happy, having built a strong professional reputation providing quality healthcare to those in need.
Looking for the latest innovations in global health? Look no further than PSI Pulse highlighting five cutting-edge programs in global health, with featured interactive quizzes and games. The latest issue includes a malaria themed crossword puzzle, where readers can test their knowledge of PSI’s malaria project in the Greater Mekong sub-region.
Pulse also includes quizzes on quality malaria treatment in the Congolese market and FP2020’s objectives for Ethiopia.
The interactive elements and games can be found at the bottom of each Pulse feature.
Want to see how a disease outbreak spreads when vaccines are in short-supply? Vax is a short, fast-paced online game that pits you against an infectious disease. With a chain of vulnerable people at risk, you must work to obtain a 70% survival rate for the outbreak.
Starting off with a limited number of vaccinations, you can work to contain the disease before it spreads and breaking apart the chain connections. But once the outbreak starts, you can only quarantine the network to stop the outbreak from expanding.
The key is to vaccinate or quarantine the people who have the most connections in the chain, limiting the impact of the disease’s spread. The game includes numerous levels of difficulty; but beware when you play the ‘hard’ level – some people in the chain will refuse vaccination!
The game was developed by Marcel Salathe’s epidemiology research group.
