One Health Games: Playful Learning for Riverine Resilience

The One Health Games are playful educational tools designed by an interdisciplinary team of landscape architecture, biobehavioral health, and veterinary science students for the children of Claverito, a floating riverine community in Iquitos, Peru. The games communicate the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health, and celebrate Claverito's unique culture connected to nature and traditional ecological knowledge rooted in the Amazon Rainforest. Students designed, built, and presented the games to Claverito children in a Children and the Environment Fair. Modeling local knowledge and everyday experiences, the games foster landscape literacy, health promotion, and cultural pride through interactive, context-specific play.

Purpose: This project builds on a multi-year partnership with the community of Claverito, an informal floating community in the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, and responds to their request to engage their children in environmental programs. Students introduced One Health- acknowledging how human, animal, and ecosystem health is interconnected and interdependent- through play-based learning. The project communicated to children, recognizing them as critical stewards of human and ecological health knowledge and behaviors, and influential to their families. Through collaborative play celebrating everyday life and landscape, the project promoted health, landscape literacy and pride in their unique riverine culture.

Context: Claverito, home to 250 people (54% children), is a floating community rooted in Indigenous traditions and traditional ecological knowledge of living with water and seasonal inundation, especially relevant in a new world of intensified climates, biodiversity loss and increasing health inequities. Houses rise and fall up to 4 meters in a season. Despite facing socio-political discrimination and public services deficits that limit their health and threaten erasure, Claverito is a close-knit resilient community that contributes to river ecosystem function.

Team: An interdisciplinary student team worked with Claverito: Two 3rd year BS in biobehavioral health; Two 4th year BS in veterinary sciences; Two 4th year and three 3rd year BS and two Masters in landscape architecture. Human and animal health students were consultants to game designs and informed the science behind the games; landscape architecture students translated science into designs and constructed the games. The whole team presented the games to Claverito at a Children and the Environment Fair attended by over 90 residents. The collaboration fostered mutual respect and emphasized the value of design as a mediator across disciplines and epistemologies.

Impact: The Fair offered a joyful public platform for knowledge exchange. Children and adults alike eagerly participated. The interactive format catalyzed important dialogue around specific One Health issues that they have control over in Claverito including hygiene, disease, nutrition and pollution that emerge from exposures in their landscape. For the design team, the project was a unique hands-on service learning experience in community design, interdisciplinary collaboration, and translation of complex One Health issues into accessible, place-based communication tools. The project served as a model for how playful media can demystify One Health science and promote collective action.

The One Health Games remain in Claverito for continued community use. Using local materials in a low-tech format allows for easy repairs, customization and potential scaleability for the ~120,000 others who live in Amazonian floodplains. By weaving scientific insight, traditional knowledge, and play, the project reframes One Health and landscape literacy as a low-pressure experience.