Ilera-Aiye: A virtual world for the development of serious games for health education and promotion in the Northeastern Brazilian countryside

The level of basic care in Brazil´s Unified Health System is a community-based attention model composed by Family Health Units, small teams of health professionals intended to solve low-complexity problems at a territory delimitated by a certain number of families, attended by Communitary Health Agents. Despite the large amount of social inequalities in Brazilian countryside, smartphones and tablets are becoming more widespread among rural population. According to Popular Education, the teaching-learning process is improved when the educator is part of the process as a facilitator, considering the prior knowledge of learners and their social, cultural and historical background, in a relationship mediated by affection, which can be reached by using games. This work proposes Ilera-Ayie (from Yoruba language, Land of Health), a virtual world to support 3D serious games for health education and promotion, focused on the communitary health agents and the young population of rural settlements at Brazil´s northeastern countryside. Non-functional requirements elicitation was performed by using participatory workshops involving participants of two rural settlements at the Northern Forest region of the State of Pernambuco, northeast of Brazil. Taking into account Popular Education and Participatory Design as theoretical backgrounds, design elements of the virtual world were defined using participatory workshops, considering identity aspects of communities, such as the local vegetation, animals, houses, historic buildings of the Brazil´s Empire age of slavery, and musical elements, trying to make a link between local and universal cultural elements.