Health education conceptions in educational games about aedes aegypti in Brazil: An integrative review

Abstract

Popular Education can contribute to the development of citizens capable of acting in the search for health promotion, by encouraging dialogues and popular participation in decision-making. Didactic games can be designed to stimulate debates that consider health on a broad view, which could be of great importance in the issue of arboviruses, by promoting dialogues contextualized with the population´s reality. In this study, an integrative review was carried out to map, in Brazil, how much educational games related to the mosquito Ae. aegypti and arboviruses focus on Popular Education. Searches were performed in the Google Scholar, Virtual Health Library and Scielo databases. Didactic game characteristics were analyzed, such as the theme addressed, the language used, modality (individual or group), and target audience, allowing a qualitative mapping and synthesis of the games identified by the search. In order to identify characteristics of health education, criteria were developed to analyze the concept of health education with which games were most identified and guide the analysis of the theoretical framework presented in the introduction of the work that described the game. Eighty-one works were included, describing seventy-two games, most of them focused on formal and elementary education. In the games, the sanitary focus of health education prevailed, characterized by the emphasis on transmitting information such as treatment and symptoms, the vector's biological cycle and forms of prevention. Popular participation was reduced to the execution of individual mosquito control actions, with an emphasis on the need to eliminate breeding sites within households. Although some games have characteristics of Popular Education in their theoretical basis, none of them has comprehensively considered health as encompassing socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental aspects. The results point to an important gap in the production and evaluation of educational games that problematize Ae. aegypti and arboviruses through dialogues that value popular knowledge and encourage popular action in planning and decision making in search of solutions.